A real-time control, management and information transport architecture for broadband networks

A unified framework of an architecture for broadband networks is outlined. The network architecture is based on three fundamental principles: the separation principle, the layering principle and the principle of asynchronous resource management. Based on these three principles the network objects are organized into an integrated reference model (IRM). The IRM consists of the traffic control, the management and information transport architecture. These architectures run on different time scales. Their main requirement is to guarantee quality of service as negotiated at call set up. The traffic control model employed consists of a statistical and a dynamic database and a set of distributed algorithms that interact by writing and reading onto these databases. They are part of a network database capable of supporting monitoring, control, configuration and fault management tasks. The design of the network database is exemplified by modeling one of the fundamental building blocks of the future gigabit architecture.<>