The ATM Gigabit Kit

The forthcoming state-of-the-art ATM switches and their network interface cards are awarded by the NSF ATM Gigabit Technology Distribution Program . The switch hardware and software have been designed at Washington University and are currently being manufactured by STT Technologies, Inc.

Planned activities for using the ATM switches include:

• Evaluating the impact of porting a selected set of distributed applications (e.g., Distributed Interactive Simulation) to ATM and refine/adapt the design of certain elements of these applications to fit, and maximize the benefit of, the ATM environment.
• Providing an experimental environment to enhance the ongoing research on ATM congestion control and bandwidth allocation strategies for real-time multimedia applications.
• Offerring an opportunity for students interested in networking to gain hands-on experience on ATM gigabit technology.

Many of the applications we are dealing with require better dynamic multicast capability than what is commercially available. Specifically, there is a need to permit more frequent changes in the membership of multicast groups. The delay associated with adding (removing) a member to (from) a group in current IP multicast systems need to be significantly reduced. There is also a need to increase the number of multicast groups that can be supported.

We plan to investigate the performance implications of using the ATM switches in real-time applications. Of particular interest to us is to evaluate the time overhead of adding a new multicast connection and of tearing down an existing connection and the maximum rate by which members of a multicast connection can change and to investigate schemes that can increase the value of this latter rate.

The availability of the gigabit switches along with APIC chips supporting AAL_5 will provide a realistic setup (complementing software simulation) for evaluating our networking research projects in a number of areas including adaptive congestion control and quality of service and bandwidth allocation for multimedia traffic.