A way to accommodate IP services in ATM access networks

Internetworking with IP networks is not only required for the acceptance of ATM, it is also key to the success of ATM in the next century. Some groups in IETF, ITU-T and the ATM Forum are working on such tasks. They have developed many useful solutions. In this paper, we present a way to accommodate IP services in ATM access networks, excluding additional equipment such as IP routers and avoiding functional addition and modification of ATM backbone network elements. In particular, we introduce accommodation of IP services in a centralized access node system (CANS) that is a multi-service access switch. CANS adopts RFC 1577 classical IP and ARP over ATM as a solution for providing IP services. However, it requires that routers be used between different logical IP subnets (LISs). To overcome this limitation of classical IPOA, we propose an enhanced IPOA mechanism that is an extension of classical IPOA. The proposed mechanism not only is compatible with the classical version, but also provides direct communication capability.