Performance Evaluation of Frame Relay, SMDS, and ABR Services in ATM Networks

The broadband integrated services digital networks are based on the ATM technology. As these networks will be deployed gradually, the existing high-speed data services, as Frame Relay and SMDS, will continue to exist and, for interoperability purposes, they will also be supported by the ATM networks. Moreover, ATM networks allows to efficiently support a new service, called available bit rate (ABR) service in the ATM Forum, which requires no bandwidth reservation. When this service is requested, data are transmitted through the network with low priority, being the available network resources shaped dynamically among all the active sources. In this paper, we first discuss how to manage FR and SMDS services in the ATM networks, and report the performance evaluation of the proposed interconnection scenarios; then, we present some preliminary simulation results on the ABR service, whose implementation needs a sophisticated reactive congestion control to obtain an acceptable quality of service.