Accelerated signalling for the Internet over ATM (ASIA)

To face up the rapid development of Internet services with even more growin g needs in terms of quality of service and bandwidth, we introduce in this paper an accelerated signalling capability for the ATM network. As a prelim inary, we draw attention to the fact that cell spacing can regulate the dyn amics of TCP over ATM if the spacing period is adequately chosen. Then, we propose to associate with each Internet information flow (generated by TCP or UDP) a Deterministic Bit Rate (DBR) virtual channel connection within th e ATM network. The cell spacing mechanism actually makes the cell stream of an Internet information flow compliant with a DBR connection, for which qu ality of service objectives in terms of negligible cell loss and bounded ce ll transfer delays can be guaranteed. To achieve this, we study a synchroni zation method between the two connection establishment procedures, namely t hat at the Internet protocol lever and the signalling procedure for the ATM network. The ATM connection is established throughout the network via a li ght-weight signalling procedure, which relies on the exchange of single cel l messages consisting of Resource Management(RM) cells. The addressing syst em proposed for this accelerated signalling capability is that of classical IP, which is and will certainly be the predominant one in the near future.