Integrating Differentiated Services with ATM

IP in the edge and ATM in the core are commonplace in today's internetworks. The IETF has proposed a new Quality of Service (QoS) mechanism namely Differentiated Services (DiffServ) for IP networks. On the other hand, QoS is an inherent feature in ATM. It is imperative that IP and ATM QoS interoperate efficiently to provide an end-to-end service guarantee. DiffServ provides a class of service named Assured Forwarding (AF) that does not exactly correlate to any of the service categories offered by ATM. AF is targeted towards a range of applications, such as real-time (rt) that do not require a constant bit rate service provided by Expedited Forwarding, and other non-real-time (nrt) applications that expect a service better than best effort. In this paper we propose the mapping of AF to the Variable Bit Rate (VBR) service category in ATM. VBR is suitable because it is available in the form of rt-VBR and nrt-VBR and could be translated appropriately based on the applications. The mapping is implemented and verified using the LBNL Network Simulator. The results of the experiments show that VBR is a better match for AF than any other service category in ATM.