An efficient signaling structure for ATM networks

As ATM becomes widely accepted as the communication standard for high speed networks, the signaling system structure and protocols that support ATM become more and more important. To support existing, future and unknown applications, the signaling system has to be very flexible and efficient. We define the signaling problem, present several possible signaling system structures, compare the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and then we propose a new signaling system structure. The fundamental idea of the new signaling system is the logical separation of the signaling system structure from the underlying communication network, even though they may be built on the some physical network. The proposed signaling system structure shows very promising performance in terms of signaling latency and scalability