Management and control functions in ATM switching systems

As research has progressed, it has become clear that the main difficulties in ATM pertain to its operational details rather than the concept. And it seems likely that these control issues will be much more complicated and costly for ATM switches when compared with current telephone circuit switches. The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is the target switching technique for the future public broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN). The purpose of this article is to examine the management and control functions in ATM switching systems implied by current industry standards and agreements on OAM and traffic control. Until now, ATM research in the areas of switch design and traffic control have progressed essentially independently. First, we briefly review the B-ISDN Protocol Reference Model and its representation of the different information flows in ATM. Network management and traffic control principles in ATM, and in particular OAM, are overviewed. With this information as background, we attempt to infer their implications on the functional blocks of an ATM switching system. An example switch architecture model with distributed management and control functions is outlined, and some design issues are discussed.<<ETX>>