The NBBS Access Node

Networking Broadband Services (NBBS) is an advanced wide-area-networking architecture that provides a rich set of services to support emerging applications for which quality of service and bandwidth reservation are critical, as well as legacy applications. The advanced features provided by the NBBS architecture require that each network node maintain a fully replicated topology database. As the size of the network increases, the network control costs at each network node become prohibitively high. The NBBS access node is a low-cost end node that introduces a hierarchical structure to the NBBS architecture, holding down network control costs while allowing the network to increase in size. The access node contains a subset of NBBS services. It is restricted to the periphery of the network and does not perform intermediate-node switching functions. It provides access to the NBBS backbone network by negotiating a relationship with an immediately attached network node (server network node) to obtain full NBBS services. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for the NBBS access node, examine the relationship between the access node and the server network node, and provide an overview of the access node architecture.