Interoperability of ATM-Ethernet interworking system: design and congestion control

The demand for integrated services of the local area network is increasing at a rapid pace with the advent of many new and existing applications: office automation, distributed computing and multimedia communications. To support these new applications, it is imperative to integrate traffic with diverse statistical characteristics on the same substrate. In this way, interconnecting different networks is needed in order to support high bandwidth and real-time applications. In this environment, the researchers objective is how to route and relieve traffic in real time between two networks without slowing their activities. This idea takes origin from problems of protocols compatibility, transmission rate and access mode of different networks. These difficulties provide new challenges and opportunities to researchers in the communication field. One such challenge is the design of the interconnection system of networks (gateway), which can help efficiently support guaranteed levels of performance for a variety of applications. Our motivation towards achieving an efficient interconnection system comprises the following: the choice and specification of the interconnection architecture that can support many types of application; specification and design of adaptation tasks that can work at a data rate of few hundred Mbps, can interface with diverse networks, and can provide adequate reconfigurability to deal with networks requirement; and the development of analytical and simulation models to evaluate design parameters, which allow to decrease cost, increase performance, and orientate designing for new gateway architectures. This paper presents design specifications of a system to interconnect networks on a target architecture.