MULTINETWORKING ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGIES

To meet demands of various application services, functionality and per formance provided by networks have become diverse, resulting in a hete rogeneous network environment. Under such circumstances, it is very im portant to offer consistent services end to end. From another perspect ive, it can be seen as a great opportunity to offer new services by ex ploiting potential powers of constituent networks. This paper introduc es virtual LAN services as the typical network services required under multinetwork environments. It then proposes Multinetworking Architect ure for realizing these services, in which coordinating functions are introduced to put together the constituent networks and construct an o verlaid virtual network. This paper also presents the main techniques developed to achieve this architecture, which include basic transport mechanisms, enhanced call control mechanisms, and service development environment.