IP and ATM - a position paper

This paper gives a technical overview of different networking technologies, such as the Internet, ATM. It describes different approaches of how to run IP on top of an ATM network, and assesses their potential to be used as an integrated services network

IP and ATM - current evolution for integrated services

Current and future applications make use of different technologies as voice, data, and video. Consequently network technologies need to support them. For many years, the ATM based Broadband-ISDN has generally been regarded as the ultimate networking technology, which can integrate voice, data, and video services. With the recent tremendous growth of the Internet and the reluctant deployment of public ATM networks, the future development of ATM seems to be less clear than it used to be. In the past IP provided (and was though to provide) only best effort services, thus, despite its world wide diffution, was not considered as a network solution for multimedia application. Currently many of the IETF working groups work on areas related to integrated services, and IP is also proposing itself as networking technology for supporting voice, data, and video services. This paper give a technical overview on the competing integrated services network solutions, such as IP, ATM and the different available and emerging technologies on how to run IP over ATM, and tries to identify their potential and shortcomings

Towards a Framework for Modelling Multimedia Conferencing Calls in the Next Generation Network

This paper is concerned with the creation of a multiparty multimedia conferencing application which can be used in Next Generation Networks. It begins by suggesting ways in which conferencing can be modeled with a focus on separating signaling and media transfer functionality. Enabling technologies which could support the modeling framework derived and which are compatible with Next Generation Network (NGN) principles are reviewed. Finally, a design and implementation for a simple multimedia conferencing application are described

A Generic Network and System Management Framework

Networks and distributed systems have formed the basis of an ongoing communications revolution that has led to the genesis of a wide variety of services. The constantly increasing size and complexity of these systems does not come without problems. In some organisations, the deployment of Information Technology has reached a state where the benefits from downsizing and rightsizing by adding new services are undermined by the effort required to keep the system running. Management of networks and distributed systems in general has a straightforward goal: to provide a productive environment in which work can be performed effectively. The work required for management should be a small fraction of the total effort. Most IT systems are still managed in an ad hoc style without any carefully elaborated plan. In such an environment the success of management decisions depends totally on the qualification and knowledge of the administrator. The thesis provides an analysis of the state of the art in the area of Network and System Management and identifies the key requirements that must be addressed for the provisioning of Integrated Management Services. These include the integration of the different management related aspects (i.e. integration of heterogeneous Network, System and Service Management). The thesis then proposes a new framework, INSMware, for the provision of Management Services. It provides a fundamental basis for the realisation of a new approach to Network and System Management. It is argued that Management Systems can be derived from a set of pre-fabricated and reusable Building Blocks that break up the required functionality into a number of separate entities rather than being developed from scratch. It proposes a high-level logical model in order to accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Network and System Management that can be used as a reference model. A development methodology is introduced that reflects principles of the proposed approach, and provides guidelines to structure the analysis, design and implementation phases of a management system. The INSMware approach can further be combined with the componentware paradigm for the implementation of the management system. Based on these principles, a prototype for the management of SNMP systems has been implemented using industry standard middleware technologies. It is argued that development of a management system based on Componentware principles can offer a number of benefits. INSMware Components may be re-used and system solutions will become more modular and thereby easier to construct and maintain

COSPO/CENDI Industry Day Conference

The conference's objective was to provide a forum where government information managers and industry information technology experts could have an open exchange and discuss their respective needs and compare them to the available, or soon to be available, solutions. Technical summaries and points of contact are provided for the following sessions: secure products, protocols, and encryption; information providers; electronic document management and publishing; information indexing, discovery, and retrieval (IIDR); automated language translators; IIDR - natural language capabilities; IIDR - advanced technologies; IIDR - distributed heterogeneous and large database support; and communications - speed, bandwidth, and wireless

Using Quality of Service can be simple: Arequipa with Renegotiable ATM

We have modified the popular Mbone toolVic (VIdeo-Conferencing) to use Arequipa (Application REQuested IP over ATM). The latter enables applications and in particular Vic, to request a direct ATM connection for its exclusive use and to directly control the traffic parameters of this connection. We have also implemented ATM Forum's UNI4.0 signaling and ITU-T's connection modification recommendation Q.2963.1, on end-systems as well as on switches. This implementation, coupled with the Arequipa mechanism, allowed Vic to negotiate and renegotiate ATM bandwidth at will, at run time. We describe how Vic accomplished that over the ATM WAN of SWISSCOM, transferring live video from Lausanne to Basel and Zurich over switched, renegotiable ATM connections. To our knowledge, this was the first time any application had the capacity to tune ATM traffic parameters at run time. Keywords: ATM, Arequipa, QoS, signaling, renegotiation, Vi

Reservation Models, From Arequipa to SRP

We analyse and illustrate two approaches that we have developed for providing reservations to flows. The first approach uses the explicit reservation model: a traffic profile is negotiated between users and the network. ATM and RSVP are two examples for this approach. In this paper we describe our experience in the ACT project EXPERT (AC094) with the explicit reservation model in the context of ATM. We show that the integration of ATM in a TCP/IP oriented operating system is easy and does not require developing applications specially for ATM. The method we have designed is called Arequipa and is described in RFC 2170. It is fully implemented in Linux. However, we are confronted with the complexity required to support a single reservation for each flow. Our analysis is that it is well suited for segregating flows in applications such as private virtual networks, but that, for multimedia networks, the cost of handling a large number of flows is too high. This and other factors led us to develop an alternative solution, based on an implicit reservation model. Our solution is called the Scalable Reservation Protocol (SRP). SRP aggregates flows inside the network: routers other than edge routers performing policing do maintain only aggregate information per port. SRP is being developed and implemented in the framework of the ACTS project DIANA (AC319). Keywords: QoS; Aggregation; Arequipa; ATM; IP; SR