GDI

Description

In WAN and LAN heterogeneous network technologies are used today and will be used in future also. In LAN 10/100/... Mbit/s Ethernet will be used to connect endsystems whereby ATM and Gbit-Ethernet will be used in the backbone. Except of servers endsystems will be attached only in some case direct to ATM or Gbit-Ethernet.

The aim of the project is to provide a seamless end to end communication with QoS, especially to support multimedia application. Access to the QoS will be possible even if the endsystems have no direct ATM access.

In most case endsystems will be attached via dedicated 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet (which is not QoS capable). Only in the backbone and in WAN ATM (which is QoS capable) will be available (Figure 1). ViAA provides multimedia applications the facility to control and use the QoS in the backbone/WAN via sufficient dimensioned Ethernet connections.

Figure 1: Virtual ATM access

We suppose that dedicated Ethernet lines to the endsystem won't be a bottleneck. Therefore no resource reservation will be necessary. Whereby resource reservation is necessary in the backbone or WAN to fulfill designated quality requirements. This is because many applications will share the available and expensive bandwidth here.

Other solutions for this problem, e.g. CIF (Cells in Frames) or FUNI, rebuild most of the ATM mechanisms on top of Ethernet (e.g. cell handling, signaling, CAC, ...). Therefore relative complex software is required in the endsystems. ViAA addresses this problem without the rebuilding of mechanisms. The functionality of ATM is provided by a virtual ATM API which is realized on the Ethernet hardware of the endsystem. The QoS of a connection will be defined from the first to the last EdgeDevice in an ATM backbone of WAN. Thus only applications using a native ATM API will be affected by ViAA. All other application will still use the common mechanisms (e.g. TCP/IP and LAN-Emulation).

Investoren

Stiftung Rheinland-Pfalz für Innovation

Contact