Architecture and technology considerations for multimedia broadband communications

The author highlights some of the rules and design tradeoffs which have to be considered in the evolution to an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) based transport network. The first rules addressed refer to the connection control partitioning between out-of-band and in-band signalling for the design of generic ATM transport and recommend that the split should consider differentiation between connection-specific and generic control functions. The second set of rules refers to ATM system design for performance and efficiency and indicates the critical service parameters responsible for optimum system operation. The third set of rules refers to services integration under performance constraints for different traffic volumes and recommends transport separation of certain performance-sensitive applications in the early network-evolution phases