The Hollowman an innovative ATM control architecture

Abstract

The current implementation of out-of-band control-in ATM networks inhibits their successful exploitation. The confusion in signalling protocols between application services and their resource requirements results in the loss of one of the key advantages of ATM which is the ability of applications to decide the requirement of their connections. The control being immutably built into the switches results in switch vendors, rather than service suppliers, defining the management policy which best suits those services. The World Wide Web has recently become one of the most important services on the internet but was unimagined five years ago. Clearly history should teach us of the impossibility of predicting the services that will be in common use in the near future. It is not at all obvious how one can define a priori the required control policy for these as yet unknown services. This paper presents an innovative control architecture called Hollowman, which devolves control from the ATM switches into an application level distributed processing environment.