Application of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (Atm) technology to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (Pacs): A survey

Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (R-ISDN) provides a range of narrowband and broad-band services for voice, video, and multimedia. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been selected by the standards bodies as the transfer mode for implementing B-ISDN; The ability to digitize images has lead to the prospect of reducing the physical space requirements, material costs, and manual labor of traditional film handling tasks in hospitals. The system which handles the acquisition, storage, and transmission of medical images is called a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). The transmission system will directly impact the speed of image transfer. Today the most common transmission means used by acquisition and display station products is Ethernet. However, when considering network media, it is important to consider what the long term needs will be. Although ATM is a new standard, it is showing signs of becoming the next logical step to meet the needs of high speed networks; This thesis is a survey on ATM, and PACS. All the concepts involved in developing a PACS are presented in an orderly manner. It presents the recent developments in ATM, its applicability to PACS and the issues to be resolved for realising an ATM-based complete PACS. This work will be useful in providing the latest information, for any future research on ATM-based networks, and PACS

Isochronets: A High-speed Network Switching Architecture

Traditional network architectures present two main limitations when applied to High- Speed Networks (HSNs): they do not scale with link speeds and they do not adequately support the Quality of Service (QoS) needs of high-performance applications. This thesis introduces the Isochronets architecture that overcomes both limitations. Isochronets view frame motions over links in analogy to motions on roads. In the latter, traffic lights can synchronize to create green waves of uninterrupted motion. Isochronets accomplish similar uninterrupted motion by periodically configuring network switches to create end-to-end routes in the network. Frames flow along these routes with no required header processing at intermediate switches. Isochronets offer several advantages. First, they are scaleable with respect to transmission speeds. Switches merely configure routes on a time scale that is significantly longer than and independent of the average frame transmission time. Isochronets do not require frame processing and thus avoid conversions from optical to electronic representations. They admit efficient optical transmissions under electronically controlled switches. Second, Isochronets ensure QoS for high-performance applications in terms of latency, jitter, loss, and other service qualities. Isochronet switches can give priority to frames arriving from selected links. At one extreme, they may give a source the right-of-way to the destination by assigning priority to all links in its path. Additionally, other sources may still transmit at lower priority. At the other extreme, they may give no priority to sources and frames en route to the same destination contend for intermediate links. In between, Isochronets can accomplish a myriad of priority allocations with diverse QoS. Third, Isochronets can support multiple protocols without adaptation between different frame structures. End nodes view the network as a media access layer that accepts frames of arbitrary structure. The main contributions of this thesis are: Design of the Isochronets architecture. Design and implementation of a gigabit per second Isochronet switch (Isoswitch). Definition of the Loosely-synchronous Transfer Mode (LTM) and the Synchronous Protocol Stack (SPS) that add synchronous and isochronous services to any existing protocol stack. Performance evaluation of Isochronets

Paying for high speed networking services

The idea of a free network is a myth of the past. Networking costs are expected to remain a burden to future IT budgets, no doubt raising questions regarding the payment of such services. Users do not normally pay to use local area networks, as companies tend to own their LANs. However, when wide area or international networks are considered, the situation is different. It is argued that in these cases the invoicing and payment system should be integral to the network's communication protocol. This implies changes to the networking protocol (to handle invoicing) as well as a new look at customary ideas of representing currency (to handle payment). In this dissertation, an invoicing and payment scheme that uses electronic cash and is implemented as part of the basic ATM protocols is discussed. The main advantages of this scheme can be summarized as a low administrative overhead and user privacy.Computer ScienceM. Sc. (Computer Science

Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies

Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled