A comparison of native ATM-multicast to IP-multicast with emphasis on mapping between the two

Given the growing use of ATM, there is great interest in migrating the protocols which run on today´s common networking technologies to ATM. There is particular interest in running the IP protocol on top of ATM. This provides an easy bridge between current networking protocols and applications and future ATM-only protocols and applications One of the move recent IP protocols, IP-multicast, has been used for video-conferencing over the Internet. This application is a good example of a current technology that could benefit from the higher bandwidths offered by ATM. IP-multicast provides a method for sending copies of packets to every member of a group simply by sending the packet to the group´s address. In order to perform this IP-multicasting on top of ATM efficiently, it is expected that a mapping of IP multicast subnet functionality to ATM must be developed. The paper examines current developments in ATM and their relation to IP-multicast in an attempt to identify schemes for achieving IP-multicast subnet functionality in ATM