An architecture for flexible high level communication services

The broadband integrated service digital network (B-ISDN) will have to offer real-time communication services; that is, it will have to transport information with performance guarantees. In this paper, we propose a communication system for real-time applications using a 155 Mbits/sec ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switch. This system is based on an intelligent communication board for PCs (personal computer). It integrates a transputer, an FPGA (field programmable gate array), and a VRAM (video random access memory) to implement flexible high level communication services. These services are adapted for real-time data transmission on a local area network based on the ATM standard. The main advantages of our architecture are the path redundancy, the large spectrum of traffic, and the high bandwidth inside the workstation. We discuss the implementation structure of our ATM communication board and evaluate its performance.