Web over ATM
This is a short introduction about the Web over ATM project extracted
from another document.
Telecommunications systems currently undergo many dramatic
changes. One of them is how data communications networks evolve from
connection-less best-effort systems (eg. IP, internet) towards
high-speed, connection-oriented networks with quality of service
guarantees (eg. ATM). This evolution must however be made in a way to
guarantee interoperability with the vast base of installed local and
wide area networks which will still exist in the future (legacy
networks). Another change is that distributed multimedia applications
like the World Wide Web gain tremendous popularity and come out of the
academic domain into the commercial world. Commercial users pay for
the service they get and thus want to have a guaranteed quality of
service (QOS).
Goals and Non-Goals
The following research goals have been set for the project:
-
Make the benefits of ATM quality available to end users in a Web
environment,
-
bring the necessary performance improvements to Web
infrastructure,
- combine the IP suite with end to end ATM,
- setup a virtual reality application,
- monitor the quality of service really needed by multimedia
applications and
- provide an infrastructure for service and network management.
On the other hand the following points have been identified as
non-goals:
- Development of a state of the art teleconferencing systems.
- Development of new multicasting algorithms and protocols for ATM
networks. (Note however that new protocols developed in the project
will be multicast aware or will support multicast).
- Downscaling of realtime audio/video streams within a network
(eg. in a multicast tree).
Overview of expected Research results
The following major research results are expected to be reached in the
Web over ATM project:
- Service and network management
- Information models for ATM resources and host behavior.
- Definition of service management modules which will allow
applications to gain information about the state and behavior of
underlying networks.
- QOS issues for video and audio
- Decomposition of video and audio streams into bands of
different quality/resolution and definition of related QOS.
- Automated control of audio/video codecs to adapt to
available network QOS.
- Web extensions for ATM
- Compatible TCP extension for improved throughput on ATM.
- Extensions to Web protocols to perform resource
reservation.
- Interoperability
- Resource reservation and transport of multimedia flows
across IP-ATM network boundaries.
- Virtual Reality
- Web extensions for VR applications.
- Protocol Engineering
- Protocol Engineering methods for specification, validation and
implementation of protocols.
Most architectural work is accompanied by an implementation under Linux,
which is the basis for demonstration of practical viability and dissemination
of the results.
back to the
homepage
Philippe Oechslin 25.7.95