On the Use of Quality of Service in IP over ATM

The future Internet will very likely include some components based on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), as well as existing network technologies. This environment produces the possibility of using one of the strengths of ATM (namely, quality-of-service guarantees) to improve the performance of Internet traffic. In this report, we document some of our work in progress on the use of performance-guaranteed ATM virtual circuits to carry IP datagrams. We are currently addressing the implications of various IP-over-ATM strategies on network performance, particularly those aspects relating to quality of service, multiplexing, and virtual circuit management. We are evaluating these performance effects using INSANE, a new object-oriented, discrete-event network simulator.