Key to the success of asynchronous transfer mode: an application programming interface

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks are scalable via a wide variety of physical link speeds and can be run in both the local and wide areas. Bandwidth reservation and quality of service guarantees make ATM attractive to deliver multimedia information in real-time. Existing protocol suites can be extended. However, they do not give access to those characteristics. Therefore, applications demand an ATM application programming interface (API) to take advantage of those features. This paper covers a special syntax mapping of the ATM API services on top of X/Open Transport Interface (XTI) which is able to give applications access directly to the special quality and traffic services of an ATM network. A particular realization of the API on the XTI environment is proposed and implemented on the MacOS networking platform. It provides a flexible and modular design of the ATM networking. Finally, the paper concludes with one ATM-aware application (video on demand) which requires real-time streaming data.