Next articleThe developing national and global information infrastructures (NII/GII) are being built upon the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) telecommunications protocol and associated protocol standards. These protocols are themselves under development through the telecommunications standards process defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which as a body is sanctioned by the United Nations. All telecommunications manufacturers use these standards to create products that can interoperate.
The ITU has recognized the ATM Forum as the instrument for the development of ATM protocols. This forum is a consortium of industry, academia, and government entities formed to quickly develop standards for the ATM infrastructure. However, because the participants represent a predominately terrestrial network viewpoint, the use of satellites in the national and global information infrastructures could be severely compromised. Consequently, through an ongoing task order, the NASA Lewis Research Center asked Sterling Software, Inc., to communicate with the ATM Forum in support of the interoperability of satellite-terrestrial networks.
This year, Dr. Raj Jain of the Ohio State University, under contract to Sterling, authored or coauthored 32 explanatory documents delivered to the ATM Forum in the areas of Guaranteed Frame Rate for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Available Bit Rate, performance testing, Variable Bit Rate voice over ATM, TCP over Unspecified Bit Rate+, Virtual Source/Virtual Destination, and network management. These contributions have had a significant impact on the content of the standards that the ATM Forum is developing. Some of the more significant accomplishments have been (1) the adoption by the ATM Forum of a new definition for Message-In, Message-Out latency and (2) improved text (clearer wording and newly defined terms) for measurement procedures, foreground and background traffic, and scalable configuration in the latency and throughput sections of the Performance Testing Baseline Text.
Lewis contact: Thomas C. von Deak, (216) 433-3277,
Thomas.C.Vondeak@grc.nasa.gov
Author: Thomas C. von Deak
Headquarters program office: OSS
Programs/Projects: Space Communications, NII/GII, ATM,
GIBN, NREN
Previous articleLast updated April 15, 1998, by Nancy.L.Obryan@nasa.gov
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