User access to broadband ISDN: full ATM or otherwise? Walking the evolutionary path

Abstract

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) transmission and switching technology is currently under much discussion in the organizations charged with establishing standards for broadband ISDN (BISDN). The focus of these groups has been to establish interfaces based on ATM technology to offer new broadband services to end-users. The attractiveness of ATM is its ability to support a wide spectrum of services within a homogeneous access structure and, possibly, homogeneous switching and transport structures.While the benefits of a cell-based access structure have been well documented, there remain issues that must be addressed before deployment of ATM-compliant systems can commence. Recent papers point to network evolution as a key issue surrounding BISDN and, hence, ATM deployment.[1.2.3] Evolution of today's predominantly circuit-switched network to a broadband cell-or packet-switched network dictates requirements on ATM to support voice and circuit emulation. The difficulties ATM presents in these applications are: echo impairments; due to delays incurred in ATM cell formatting and processing, bit error ratio impairments; due to the jitter inherent in the inter-anival times of cells associated with an ATM virtual circuit, and the network costs incurred to address these