A taxonomy of interaction models for Internet and ATM quality of service architectures

In communication systems there are two "worlds" at the moment: Internet and ATM. Both possess Quality of Service (QoS) architectures which shall allow them to integrate services of data and telecommunications formerly perform ed by separate infrastructures. We believe that none of them will be able t o oust the other. That means both will exist for at least the middle-term f uture. Therefore, an interaction between both appears to be necessary, espe cially in the field of distributed multimedia applications where both world s "meet" first. In order to perform gracefully, distributed multimedia appl ications require a certain QoS provision, in particular from the communicat ion system. Thus, for such applications the existence of heterogeneous IP/A TM networks makes the interaction between Internet and ATM QoS architecture s an important issue. In this article a taxonomy of interaction models for the Internet and ATM QoS architectures is developed. We do not let our view be restricted by existing approaches for the interaction between ATM and I nternet. Instead we will derive more unconventional models by regarding the possible communication patterns based on different topological variants fo r heterogeneous IP/ATM networks. The investigation is driven by application s' communication requirements. This is accomplished by examining possibly i nteracting applications and their communication patterns. The interaction m odels are contrasted and compared to each other and their assumptions and i mplications are shown. The derived taxonomy of models allows us to classify proposed approaches for the interaction of Internet and ATM QoS architectu res. Thereby we are able to identify the basic assumptions of these approac hes and their corresponding restrictions.