Simplified management of ATM traffic

ATM has been under a thorough standardization process for more than ten years. Looking at it now, what have we achieved during this time period? Originally ATM was meant to be an easy and an efficient protocol enabling varying services over a single network. What it is turning to be is ‘yet another ISDN’-network full of hopes and promises but too difficult to implement and expensive to market. The fact is that more and more ‘nice features’ are implemented on the cost of overloading network with hard management procedures. Therefore we need to adopt a new approach. This approach keeps a strong reminds on ‘what is necessary.' This paper presents starting points for an alternative approach to the traffic management. We refer to this approach as ‘the minimum management principle.' Choosing of the suitable service classes for the ATM network is made difficult by the fact that the more services one implements the more management he needs. This is especially true for the variable bit rate connections that are usually treated based on the stochastic models. Stochastic model, at its best, can only reveal momentary characteristics in the traffic stream not the long range behavior of it. Our assumption is that ATM will move towards Internet in the sense that strict values for quality make little or no sense in the future. Therefore stochastic modeling of variable bit rate connections seems to be useless. Nevertheless we see that some traffic needs to have strict guarantees and that only economic way of doing so is to use PCR allocation.