LAN/MAN interworking in the 802.6/SMDS environment

The tremendous growth of local area networks (LANs) is creating a demand to interconnect them over distance. Metropolitan area networks (MANs) provide an optimal platform for interconnecting LANs, since they combine high performance with LAN-like sharing of bandwidth over a large geographic area. A description is given of the primary issues, needs, and architectural approaches to LAN/MAN interconnection. Regarding LANs, the focus is on IEEE 802 LAN architectures, since they are by far the most common and have become part of the open systems interconnection (OSI) standard suite. Regarding MANs, the focus is on the IEEE 802.6/SMDS (switched multimegabit data service) MAN architecture.<
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