Adaptive QoS-Based API for ATM Networking

This paper describes work-in-progress on a new adaptive QoS-based application programming interface (API) for ATM networking. This ATM API, referred to as the “ATM Service Manager (ASM)” is motivated by the observation that current transport interfaces do not provide QoS features necessary for multimedia applications to achieve desired performance/cost objectives on multiservice ATM networks. In general, an application connected to ATM has a choice of transport protocols (e.g. TCP, UDP, alternative multimedia stream protocols), ATM service class (e.g. ABR, VBR, CBR) and QoS parameters for each media type. It is our view that application software should be shielded from the complexity of QoS-based service management by an adaptive API which is responsible for mapping the application requirements to ATM.