A taxonomy of interaction models for Internet and ATM quality of service architectures

In communication systems there are two worlds at the moment: Internet and ATM. Both possess Quality of Service (QoS) architectures which shall allow them to integrate services of data and telecommunications formerly performed by separate infrastructures. We believe that none of them will be able to oust the other. That means both will exist for at least the middle-term future. Therefore, an interaction between both appears to be necessary, especially in the field of distributed multimedia applications where both worlds meet first. In order to perform gracefully, distributed multimedia applications require a certain QoS provision, in particular from the communication system. Thus, for such applications the existence of heterogeneous IP/ATM networks makes the interaction between Internet and ATM QoS architectures an important issue. In this article a taxonomy of interaction models for the Internet and ATM QoS architectures is developed. We do not let our view be restricted by existing approaches for the interaction between ATM and Internet. Instead we will derive more unconventional models by regarding the possible communication patterns based on different topological variants for heterogeneous IP/ATM networks. The investigation is driven by applications' communication requirements. This is accomplished by examining possibly interacting applications and their communication patterns. The interaction models are contrasted and compared to each other and their assumptions and implications are shown. The derived taxonomy of models allows us to classify proposed approaches for the interaction of Internet and ATM QoS architectures. Thereby we are able to identify the basic assumptions of these approaches and their corresponding restrictions.