Internetworking across public ATM networks

The emergence of public ATM networks, such as B-ISDN and SMDS, is considered to have a high impact on future internetworking environments. This paper presents a new bridging architecture designed for that purpose and discusses its feasibility in TCP/IP networks. The new architecture, called Open Bridging, uses special capabilities of public ATM networks, such as the hierarchical addressing mechanism and the routing support inside the network, to provide for efficient interconnection of remote LANs across public ATM networks. The operation of Open Bridges does not interfere with current TCP/IP protocols. However, the efficiency of Open Bridging can be obtained in the interconnection of TCP/IP networks if a slight extension to the address resolution protocol (ARP) is implemented to push the routing of data packets down to the MAC level. Moreover, the architecture of Open Brouters is also proposed to enable full interoperability among domains using either Open Bridging or IP routing