Interworking Support in a Multidicipline Switch

The evolving multimedia services are foreseen to be delivered to customers over heterogeneous transport networks. The ATM technology has been considered as the most obvious choice, but other transporting concepts have also been studied and entirely new ones suggested, especially, for IP based communications. Diversity in transporting concepts implies that network nodes, such as switches and routers, should connect to different kinds of networks. This introduces the need to support multiple switching disciplines in a single switching fabric and, additionally, a clear need for interworking. As a solution to the emerging problem, this paper introduces the concept of multidiscipline switching to integrate different switching systems into a compact fabric and to offer interworking between the connected networks.