Interconnection of mans: architecture and algorithms for bandwidth allocation

A wide-area network architecture, based on the interconnection of high speed, integrated services Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), is presented. The network offers packet-based services similar to those considered in the ongoing studies on ATM for BISDN. To maintain the real-time traffic capabilities of the component MANs a bandwidth management algorithm has been devised. The resulting architecture does not offer a full connection-oriented type of service, but avoids the problems associadted with pure datagram architectures. Technical feasibility is explored and major performance figures are evaluated.