ABSTRACT
SUMMARY Originally intended for application to B-ISDN, which is carrier oriented, ATM technology has been actively studied for application to LAN based environments since the beginning of the 1990s. One of the most notable things in LAN area is development of a rich set of application services. A number of technical specifications for major application services have been developed, which include LAN Emulation, IP over ATM, Multi-protocol over ATM, Voice and Telephony over ATM, as well as Native ATM services such as MPEG2 over ATM. Development of these new services raises new challenges related to traffic management. Keeping pace with the development, a number of traffic control mechanisms have also been developed to maximize the performance of these services. Traffic control and management techniques, however, are still in the early stage of their learning curve. Network engineers are facing challenging problems related to traffic management. This paper reviews major service-related technologies and discusses traffic management issues associated with these services. Especially, it describes the real world traffic management as practiced by average network engineers with state-of-the-art products. Although the thechnology developments have advanced through many research works, there seems to be a considerable gaps between the practice and principles. This paper discusses the traffic issues of ATM LAN from this perspective and points out some challenges for the future. Most of the difficulties in handling traffic issues stems from the differences in implementation details. To alleviate this difficulty, the introduction of a unified node model which describes the traffic handling capability.of ATM nodes in sufficient detail is suggested.
key words: ATM LAN, traffic management, network engineering, traffic model
