Support and evaluation performance of B-ISDN services over distributed networks

Signalling functionality is considered as a necessary feature of B-ISDN networks for the support of connection oriented services between end users. Signalling channels are established between the network and the user and are active throughout the lifetime of the data connections, providing a dedicated service control and monitoring path across the network. This paper elaborates the implementation issues to be followed for the development of broadband terminals supporting ATM signalling functionality and exhibits a novel architecture based on sockets communication, which allows any user connected to a distributed network (e.g. LAN) to take advantage of the provided ATM services. It also presents the method that was adopted to test the signalling stack for conformance against the specifications. Finally, the paper concludes with the presentation and an extensive discussion of evaluation performance measurements obtained during the most basic signalling operations