A study of the inverse multiplexing for ATM (IMA) protocol

Many public service providers and companies have built their ATM networks over traditional T1/E1 infrastructure. As the need for the extra bandwidth increases, the ATM Forum has specified the inverse multiplexing for ATM (IMA) protocol that describes a method for transporting the ATM traffic over a logical group of multiple T1/E1 links. This paper outlines some IMA features and intends to show that some specific losses of cell delineation (LCD) can periodically occur. Based on the study of the sender buffer of the transmission convergence function, a solution to avoid such a LCD is proposed.