An Architecture for Managing Virtual Circuit and Virtual Path Services on ATM Networks
Nikolaos Anerousis
Email: nikos_AT_research.att.com
Aurel A. Lazar
Email: aurel_AT_ctr.columbia.edu
Abstract
ATM networks rely on the Virtual Circuit (VC) and Virtual Path (VP) concept
to provide unicast connection-oriented services with Quality of Service
guarantees. This paper presents a model for managing the configuration and
performance of the VC and VP services in these networks. The model
consists of a connection management architecture that provides the services
and is instrumented for network management purposes, and a network
management architecture that uses the OSI management model to provide
access to the appropriate service monitoring and control functions. The
network management architecture proposes complete managed object
definitions that achieve a variety of monitoring and control objectives:
service configuration, service performance at the call and cell level, and
service control. The latter includes the capability to establish VPs and
control their allocated networking capacity and also control parameters of
the signaling system that affect the performance of the VC service. The
architecture was implemented in its entirety on the Xunet ATM testbed, and
several experiments were conducted to illustrate the trade-off between the
throughput of the VC service and the allocation of capacity to VPs. The
experiments further demonstrated that the signaling system can create
throughput bottlenecks in the absence of VPs in the network, and therefore,
the network operator can increase performance by controlling the VP
distribution.
Keywords: ATM; service management; virtual circuit; virtual path; Xunet
JNSM: Vol. 4, No. 4, 1996
An Architecture for Managing Virtual Circuit and Virtual Path Services on ATM Networks [Vol. 4, No. 4, 1996]
NOTE: only abstract of paper available on-line
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