Build a gigabit MAN with ETSI/IEEE DQDB standard compliant nodes

The introduction of broadband connectionless services such as SMDS is requiring dramatically increasing performances to the network providing them. The suitable technologies are DQDB MANs (now) and ATM switches (after 1996). To overcome the current limitations of MANs, new solutions have been studied within an ESPRIT European Project to implement standard compliant DQDB nodes. The paper provides the description of such a MAN node prototype, equipped with 155 Mbit/s DQDB accesses and designed in a way to evolve toward ATM switching, which will be presented as a product in 1994. Thanks to the node characteristics it is possible to build MAN networks with different topologies able to carry out distributed switching up to 1.2 Gbit/s. The paper describes the basic concept permitting that and the characteristics of a few topologies