InterWorking Between IFMP Switching And B-ISDN Access Protocols

IP traffic is growing every day and it is reasonable that IP routers will become bottlenecks in the near future. A solution seems to be the IP switching approach. This approach consists in the coupling of IP routing to fast hardware switching, typically ATM. In this work we are focused on a particular IP switching paradigm, the Ipsilon Flow Management Protocol (IFMP). Nowadays IFMP switching is supported within LAN environments. Our effort is focused to export IFMP switching to WAN environments, in particular to public ATM backbones. In this work we introduce an interworking mechanism to couple IFMP switching to B-ISDN access signaling capabilities (ITU Q.2931). This mechanism is fully compliant to both IFMP protocol and B-ISDN signaling. Detailed simulations, using SDT tools, of this interworking mechanism has been carried on and it will be described.