A new architecture to support circuit emulation services on ATM networks

Recently, the concept of isochronous cell sharing and path merging/splitting strategy in an ATM network has been proposed to increase the network performance. The circuit emulation service (CES) on an ATM network is intended to emulate point-to-point circuits. It is interesting to investigate the problem of selecting a CES path for each of CES channel requests by using a minimal total amount of CES bandwidth (total issued CES cells). In this paper, we show that given a set of established CES paths and a set of new CES requests, the problem of using a minimal amount of CES bandwidth to service these CES traffic, including the established paths and new requests, is NP-complete. A new architecture of ATM merge-split switch is also proposed to implement the concept of CES cell sharing and path merging/splitting strategy which guarantees the service quality constraint of CES traffic.