Overview of enterprise network developments

We define an enterprise network (EN) broadly as follows: a corporate-wide network that ties together the communications, processing, and storage resources of the corporation, thereby making those resources available to users distributed throughout the corporation. Such a network typically contains both customer-owned elements and interpremises transport provided by a public network provider. This definition is intentionally broad enough to encompass the very different forms of past, present, and future ENs. As discussed subsequently, a more limited definition is often utilized that focuses on the EN in its currently common form as a local area network (LAN) internetwork. The EN construct has already provided a powerful capability for corporate distributed processing. As it continues to evolve, its importance and influence in corporate networking will continue to grow. A number of alternative paths for the future EN are identified, both at the architectural level and with respect to technology details. The key architectural issue is the degree to which the existing EN will evolve to the integrated EN. At the technology level, the most burning question is the future role of ATM, which at this stage can be viewed as either a technology that promises to integrate the networks used for all forms of communications, or a technology that is not optimal for any communication form, and is at best a compromise solution. In addition, there are still considerable uncertainties as to the future of DCE and other standard approaches to applications support, the degree to which virtual LANs will appear in the EN, the role of the bandwidth manager, and the replacement of today's dominant use of dedicated circuits in the interpremises network (IPN) by ring-based access networks and fast packet switching.