ATM BASICS

By

Miroslaw Wasniowski

Published By: Althos Publishing

404 Wake Chapel Road Fuquay-Varina, NC 27526 USA Telephone: 1-800-227-9681 1-919-557-2260 Fax: 1-919-557-2261 email: Success@Althos.com web: www.Althos.com

Althos

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the authors and publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. Copyright 2004 By Althos Publishing First Printing Printed and Bound by Lightning Source Printing, La Vergne, TN USA

Every effort has been made to make this manual as complete and as accurate as possible. However, there may be mistakes both typographical and in content. Therefore, this text should be used only as a general guide and not as the ultimate source of information. Furthermore, this manual contains information on telecommunications accurate only up to the printing date. The purpose of this manual to educate. The authors and Althos Publishing shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused, or alleged to be caused, directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

International Standard Book Number: 1-932813-13-6

Acknowledgements

We thank the many gifted people who gave their technical and emotional support for the creation of this book. In many cases, published sources were not available on this subject area. Experts from ATM manufacturers, Education, consulting, trade associations and other telecommunications related companies gave their personal precious time to help us and for this we sincerely thank and respect them. We thank the industry experts including: .Dr Andrzej Wajda with AGH Technical University of Science and Technology, Gran Grafford at SoftMate, Iwona Maksymowicz and Kondrat Budych at APIS, Janusz Uszko and Piotr Gruszczynski at nGT-wise Lennart Andreasson and Svein Tore Almaas with Ericsson Education, Mattias Hyll from AU-SYSTEM, Marek Langowski at TeleMobileConsulting, and Tadeusz Malkiewicz with TP SA Special thanks to the people who assisted with the production of this book including: Lawrence Harte and Karen Bunn (editor) at Althos who helped ensure this book was at the highest industry standard and that the book contained valuable and quality information.

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About the Author

Miroslaw Wasniowski Miroslaw Wasniowski has a strong background in training and knowledge transfer for major vendors of telecommunication equipment and mobile telephony operators present at the global market. He has collected a great amount of experience, creating and executing training programmes as well as providing consulting for major international companies operating at the telecommunication market (including Ericsson and Motorola). He studied telecommunication systems at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland, where was involved in the research in the area of ATM LAN installations. The results of the research program were presented at the CIS Solutions for an Enlarged NATO conference, which took place in 1999 in Zegrze, Poland. After completing his studies, he worked as an Ericsson Consultant developing and presenting advanced training programmes on behalf of Ericsson Education Europe (located in Stockholm) across Europe and other continents. With the advent of GPRS technology, Miroslaw was invited to join the worldwide project addressed to Ericssons key customers, in which he delivered a number of seminars preparing mobile telephony operators for this new and innovative technology. Due to his in-depth knowledge of ATM technology, he was consecutively asked to participate in the Knowledge Step programme, which was intended to increase the overall knowledge of new technologies within Ericsson AB. After joining the programme, he created and presented a series of seminars related to the ATM technology for major Ericssons departments.

ATM Basics

The completion of his further studies in management in 2002 allowed him to assist in the establishment and development of new consulting company called nGT-wise, which is focused on the next generation technologies in the domain of IT and telecommunication. Miroslaw holds there the position of a Vice President, and manages the domain of datacom and transmission technologies. Basing on his experience Miroslaw recognised the importance of new concepts in management with relation to innovation processes, especially in Accession States from Central and Easter Europe, and collected large knowledge in the domain of Knowledge Management. He is a member of the KnowledgeBoard under European Knowledge Management Forum. He has graduated with very high remarks from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland, and received his M.Sc. Diplomas in Electronics and Telecommunication as well as in Management and Marketing.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1- WHAT IS ATM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 WHY ASYNCHRONOUS? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 IS ATM A PACKET SWITCHED OR CIRCUIT SWITCHED TECHNOLOGY? . . . . . . 2 1.3 ADVANTAGES OF ATM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3.1 Support for variety of applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 1.3.2 Scalability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 1.3.3 Interworking with other technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 1.3.4 Maturity Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 CHAPTER 2- HOW DOES ATM WORK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1 ATM PROTOCOL REFERENCE MODEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2 PHYSICAL LAYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.2.1 Sub-layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 2.2.2 Physical Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 2.2 ATM LAYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2.2.1 ATM Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 2.2.2 ATM Cell Header . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 2.2.3 Cell Transmission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 2.2.4 OAM Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20 2.2.5Cell Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 2.2.6 Virtual Channels and Virtual Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 2.2.7 ATM Switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 2.3 ATM ADAPTATION LAYER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2.3.1 AAL Type 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 2.3.2 AAL Type 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 2.3.3 AAL Type 3/4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 2.3.4 AAL Type 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 2.3.5 Other types of AAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

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CHAPTER 3- VIRTUAL CIRCUITS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.1. PERMANENT VIRTUAL CONNECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.2. SWITCHED VIRTUAL CONNECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.3. SOFT PERMANENT VIRTUAL CONNECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 3.4. Point-to-Multipoint Connections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 CHAPTER 4- ATM SERVICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 4.1 QUALITY OF SERVICE CATEGORIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 4.2 QUALITY OF SERVICE PARAMETERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4.2.1 Negotiable QoS Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63 4.2.2 Non-negotiable QoS Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 4.3 TRAFFIC DESCRIPTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 4.4 TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.4.1 Connection Admission Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 4.4.2 Resource Reservation and Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 4.4.3 Usage Parameter Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 4.4.4 Traffic Shaping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 4.4.5 Cell Loss Priority Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 4.4.6 Explicit Forward Congestion Indication . . . . . . . . . . . . .76 4.4.7 Rate-based Congestion Control in ABR Service . . . . . . . .77 CHAPTER 5- USING ATM TO CONNECT SYSTEMS . . . . . 79 5.1 ATM ADDRESS FORMATS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.5 5.6 ADDRESS REGISTRATION UNI PROTOCOL . . . . . . PNNI PROTOCOL . . . . . AINI PROTOCOL . . . . . B-ICI PROTOCOL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 84 84 87 90 91

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CHAPTER 6- WHERE IS ATM USED TODAY . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.1 IP OVER ATM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.2. VOICE OVER ATM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 6.2.1 Circuit Emulation Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100 6.2.2. ATM Trunking for Narrowband Services using AAL 2 .105 6.3. FRAME RELAY AND ATM INTERWORKING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 CHAPTER 7-HOW IS ATM CHANGING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 7.1 Inverse Multiplexing for ATM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 ATM over ADSL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 GFR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Differentiated-UBR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 The evolution of methods IP and ATM interworking . . . . . . . .115 . . . .116 . . . .118 . . . .119 . . . .120

ATM REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 GLOSSARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1X INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1X CATALOG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1X

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Preface
Introduction

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been widely concerned as one of the biggest achievements in the area of telecommunication within last fifteen years. It is in fact a very broad definition addressing a technology that largely determined the rapid growth of the Internet in 90s. ATM networks have been deployed because they offered a transport for disparate services including IP but not limited to IP. IP is actually transmitted over ATM, but its really the circuit services and other high-margin services that drive the design goals of ATM networks. ATM is most often found in service provider networks where QOS is important, even for IP-based services. Prior to discussing the technology related aspects of ATM, it would be more than reasonable to ask a question: can this technology still bring any significant value to the end user and the operator? This question seems to be crucial as it has been almost thirteen years since the first ATM standards were released. Such a long period of time especially within the telecom world is almost an epoch. With the time passing by a number of competing solutions have been designed and successfully introduced to the global market. Over the next several months, there will begin a shift away from ATM in the control plane to MPLS as MPLS standards have almost established. This shift has already begun for the IP service providers that used ATM for traffic engineering and will continue as service providers look to converge multiple networks onto one common core infrastructure. On the other hand, MPLS and DiffServ have been touted as enabling IP QOS, but they are generally not considered robust enough to support network performance

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SLAsat least not yet. So how about ATM? After the slowdown, which started in early 2001, hit the market of emerging technologies, there is no doubt that within incoming years the world will definitely see ATM having its own slice of the networking market. ATM has the reputation of highly reliable platform and is addressing the needs of customers today. ATMs interoperability capabilities afford a level of flexibility that permits to address the needs of customers from TDM through Frame Relay PRI to DSL access. A number of carriers have made significant investments in ATM. They would continue to explore the opportunities it offers and try to extend its useful lifecycle.

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