Simple Integrated Media Access (SIMA)

The basic objectives of future Internet are to increase the network capacity, to offer a practical real-time service, and to develop a feasible charging scheme. These objectives introduce very strict requirements for the trafilc control system. This paper presents a new simple approach for traffic management: Simple Integrated Media Access (SIMA). According to the SIMA concept each customer shall define only two issues before a connection establishment: a nominal bit rate (NBR) and the selection between real-time and non-real-time service classes. NBR forms the basis of charging, and it defines how the network capacity is divided among different connections during overload situations. Simplicity of SIMA means that, on the one hand, the network operator does not guarantee the continuous availability of nominal bit rate, and on the other hand, the user is allowed to send data with any bit rate independently of the NBR. The strength of SIMA lies in its wide area of applications. There is no need to build complex systems with several service classes each appropriate to only certain applications. This paper is based mainly on an unfinished IETF draft (for this reason some figures and tables are in text format). Information about SIMA is also available from http://www-mc.nokia.com/sima/.