Department of Computer Science and Technology

Technical reports

Protocol design for high speed networks

Derek Robert McAuley

January 1990, 100 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted September 1989 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-186

Abstract

Improvements in fibre optic communication and in VLSI for network switching components have led to the consideration of building digital switched networks capable of providing point to point communication in the gigabit per second range. Provision of bandwidths of this magnitude allows the consideration of a whole new range of telecommunications services, integrating video, voice, image and text. These multi-service networks have a range of requirements not met by traditional network architectures designed for digital telephony or computer applications. This dissertation describes the design, and an implementation, of the Multi-Service Network architecture and protocol family, which is aimed at supporting these services.

Asynchronous transfer mode networks provide the basic support required for these integrated services, and the Multi-Service Network architecture is designed primarily for these types of networks. The aim of the Multi-Service protocol family is to provide a complete architecture which allows use of the full facilities of asynchronous transfer mode networks by multi-media applications. To maintain comparable performance with the underlying media, certain elements of the MSN protocol stack are designed with implementation in hardware in mind. The interconnection of heterogeneous networks, and networks belonging to different security and administrative domains, is considered vital, so the MSN architecture takes an internetworking approach.

Full text

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-186,
  author =	 {McAuley, Derek Robert},
  title = 	 {{Protocol design for high speed networks}},
  year = 	 1990,
  month = 	 jan,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-186.ps.gz},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-186},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-186}
}