ATM‐oriented multimedia LAN architecture

Abstract The shared media local area networks (LAN) such as Ethernet/FDDI has the bottleneck of bandwidth scalability. ATMLAN based on asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch is considered interesting at present as the next‐generation multimedia LAN to dissolve this bottleneck. The research and development of ATM has mostly been promoted for application to the public network. With respect to LAN, a new investigation is needed which includes the architecture since there are various requirements such as compatibility to the existing protocol, the simplification of the network control, and the drastic reduction of the system cost. This paper proposes the ATM‐oriented multimedia LAN (ATOMLAN) architecture which meets the fore‐mentioned requirements. The proposed architecture has the following three features: (1) the ATMLAN addressing, considering the affinity to the existing protocol and the efficient internetworking; (2) the high‐speed connection control to realize a high throughput for the connectionless‐type data transfer; and (3) the simple and efficient traffic control for the high‐speed burst‐multimedia service. Using the proposed architecture, a seamless high‐speed multimedia network can be realized, from the desk‐top to the broadrand network.