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Building an ATM Wide Area Network
July 26, 1999
By David Willis
If you're in a distributed enterprise and your wide area bandwidth needs are on the rise, an ATM WAN backbone can provide the growth that you're after. At the high end, ATM delivers bandwidth at DS3, OC-3, OC-12, and beyond. At the low end, T1 and Inverse Multiplexing over ATM (IMA) over T1 circuits provides affordable access. Existing frame relay backbones can be merged with and/or migrated to an ATM infrastructure using Frame Relay to ATM service interworking.
Beyond raw capacity, the primary benefit of an ATM backbone is reliable consolidation of traffic types. Historically data, voice, and video networks have proliferated in parallel ISDNVideo, VoiceNet, DataNet PDF Charts each with their own equipment, circuits, management systems, and management personnel. As the speeds in the data network increase while its cost plummets, the data network's capacity relative to the voice and video networks makes it an attractive choice for carrying all traffic types, simplifying management and reducing cost.
ATM isn't the only alternative for traffic consolidation, but its reliability and efficiency make it worth considering. Legacy WANs have long used Time Division Multiplexing to offer timeslots to various traffic types. Unfortunately, most TDM techniques statically allocate a channel to a given traffic type, resulting in a waste capacity when this specific traffic type isn't present, even while other traffic is congested. Alternatively, Frame Relay http://www.networkcomputing.com/netdesign/frame1.html can be used to carry voice and even video http://www.networkcomputing.com/917/917f1.html over the WAN and deliver better utilization of WAN circuits. IP can also carry real-time traffic. However, Frame Relay and IP both lack many essential traffic management and signaling mechanisms to carry delay-and loss-sensitive traffic with the same degree of reliability found in traditional voice and video backbones.
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