Overview of the NBBS architecture

Networking BroadBand Services (NBBS) architecture has been developed by IBM to meet the requirements of high-speed networking. These include addressing problems caused by emerging multimedia applications with extremely high bandwidth requirements and quality-of-service guarantees, as well as those of supporting a variety of existing protocols and interfaces. This paper offers an overview of NBBS and provides insight into the technology and structure of the architecture. Included is a synopsis of the driving forces behind the architecture and a summary of how the challenges of this new environment are addressed.