ELISA: European Linkage between Internet Integrated and Differentiated Services over ATM

Nowadays we are witnessing the growth of Internet at an unprecedented rate. However, the current Internet does not guarantee Quality of Service for user flows, which prevents the provision of good quality for multimedia streaming applications over long distance. This led to the development of the Integrated Services architecture and recently to the Differentiated Services architectures. On the other hand, ATM networks are being installed for the public infrastructure of B-ISDN throughout the world with advanced QoS capabilities to offer various service classes to customers. Considering these trends it seems important to network operators to integrate Internet protocols and the mature ATM QoS technology. This paper presents a specific approach for such an integration which is taken in the international project ELISA (European Experiment on the Linkage between Internet Integrated Services and ATM), funded by the EU through the ACTS programme. The approach is based on a combination of the Integrated Services architecture and the Differentiated Services architecture. Moreover, the approach serves as a linkage between those architectures and the ATM technology. A trial will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.