An architecture for managing virtual circuit and virtual path services in ATM networks

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. IntroductionThe significant progress achieved in the past few years in the development of signaling standards for ATM networks has generated a strong interest for architectures that enable the introduction and management of broadband services. This paper presents a model for managing the Virtual Circuit (VC) and Virtual Path (VP) connection services in ATM networks with Quality of Service Guarantees. These services can be regarded as the core broadband services, in the sense that other more complex services such as video-on-demand, video conferencing, virtual networks, etc., can be built on top of them. We give special attention to the VP service for the following reasons: VPs can be provided as an end-to-end connection service to the users or can be employed by the network operator to opti- mize the call level performance of the ATM network. In this case, they can be used to establish connections for the VC service at a reduced signaling processing cost. This implies that the VP configuration (especially with respect to resource allocation) has a direct impact on the VC service performance. Therefore, the observed performance of the VC service should influence the decisions regarding the distribution of networking capacity to VPs (the VP distribution), and consequently, the VC and VP management architectures should be integrated.In addition to the architecture for managing the VC and VP services, there is a need to develop an understanding of the architecture that provides these services, i.e., the conn...

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