Viewing approaches to a large scale Internet backbone with ATM technology

The explosion of the Internet is still continuing due to the expansion of the number of users and multimedia services. To replace the conventional router network, a new paradigm of some multi-layer switching techniques are proposed in the standardization sectors and forums. We estimate the best solution for a very large scale Internet backbone, i.e. a nationwide scale. After estimating the size of the Internet in the future, we study the high speed internetworking solutions. We especially compare the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) and CL (connectionless)-network from the view point of scalability and the size of the buffers of each node.