SMART - A MANY-TO-MANY MULTICAST PROTOCOL FOR ATM

We present a protocol for controlling a shared ATM multicast tree supp orting many-to-many communication, The protocol supports one or severa l ATM virtual channel connections (VCC's) of the many-to-many type, Th e number of VCC's is independent of the number of endpoints, The proto col guarantees that there is no interleaving on any VCC of the tree, T he protocol also guarantees that the traffic contract associated with the VCC's is respected, thus making it possible to use ordinary VCC's of the constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VER), or unspecifie d bit rate (UBR) class, No resequencing server or cell buffering insid e the network is required, and all cell forwarding is performed at the ATM layer, We describe the protocol both informally and formally.