A Native ATM API Suited for Multimedia Communication

ATM, the asynchronous transfer mode, was developed to meet two main goals. Firstly, it provides a flexible transmission technology. Secondly, it offers a set of new services to the user [Part94]. In order to take advantage of ATM’s strengths, one might want to use its services directly. To be able to do so, in particular to be able to integrate access to ATM services into own applications, one is in need of a powerful ATM application programming interface (API). In this paper, we first present the design and implementation of such an ATM API for Digital Alpha workstations running Digital UNIX. Moreover, we describe how the basic ATM service is enhanced by setting an implementation of SandiaXTP (Xpress Transport Protocol) on top of it. Finally, we give an overview over a monitor for this ATM environment designed to compute quality of service (QoS) parameters from protocol information, detect QoS violations by comparing them to desired values, and display the results graphically.