Public Review for Flow Labelled IP over ATM: Design and Rationale

摘要

Flow labelled IP over ATM was both an architecture and a technology to solve a number of problems that emerged from the train-crash that was the collision between Broadband-ISDN and the Internet. It was not merely a hack to work around the mismatch in semantics between a virtual circuit switched underlay and a stateless datagram routed overlay. The intention was to take advantage of facilities offered by the underlay technology such as flow state maintenance and flowisolation and protection in switches, to offer QoS at various levels of granularity, whether for unicast or multicast. The paper was one of the seminal influences for what is now the burgeoning MPLS industry, although in the architecture described we see something simpler, more elegant, and, perhaps, more aligned to the traditional Internet design philosphy [Clark88], than to the telecommunications mindset in the hardcore Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN) Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) proponents.