Efficient transport of IP flows across ATM networks

This paper presents a proposal for the integration of enhanced ATM, capable of switched virtual circuits and of dynamic bandwidth re-negotiation, and of enhanced IF, capable of the support to Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee through RSVP and packet scheduling. Rather than viewing IP packet scheduling and ATM-level QoS mechanisms as mutually exclusive, the approach in this work is to take advantage of both, exploiting new mechanisms for the integration of RSVP and ATM signalling. This paper discusses the main principles of the proposed architecture and documents the development of a prototype implementation. Preliminary experimental measurements contrast the performance of our proposal against conventional alternative solutions.