IP multicast shortcut over ATM: a winner combination

The philosophy of full IP control over ATM equipment has been advocated by the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), as a fairly simple but promising approach to boost Internet throughput. Existing IP routing protocols run on ATM switches to do topology discovery and route calculation, but packet forwarding is done by switching encapsulated IP packets directly in ATM, i.e. by shortcutting the IP forwarding engine. This paper evaluates the potential of applying this model to IP multicast, based on the experience gained from a lab prototype that demonstrates the concept of IP multicast shortcut over ATM.