The introduction of broadband ATM networks and services will raise new operational issues. An area of significant challenge to the network operators will be network dimensioning. ATM networks differ from today's STM networks in that they will have to provide acceptable performance with respect to not only call blocking, but also cell loss and cell delay. Consequently, it is important to understand the interaction of call blocking and cell loss/delay in ATM networks. The paper presents a method of exploiting the interaction of call blocking and cell loss performance in order to efficiently operate the ATM networks. Specifically, the paper demonstrates that when the network is dimensioned or engineered to meet an appropriate call blocking objective, the cell loss performance perceived by the accepted calls can be significantly better than the cell loss objective set for the connection admission control (CAC) to admit or deny a call.>

A framework is presented for the specification of performance requirements, and several high-level design principles for performance-driven ATM traffic controls based on resource reservation are developed. Simulation results illustrate that to guarantee performance levels, bursty traffic should be statistically multiplexed only if connection peak rates are low relative to the network link speed or burst durations are short. A pragmatic traffic management approach that favors simplicity and robustness in the traffic control design rather than optimizing bandwidth efficiency is stressed.>

The authors present a multimedia medical communications system based on packet local area networks. This system is intended to facilitate the communications between radiologists and physicians within a hospital. Radiographs are taken, digitized, and then stored in the database. Radiologists retrieve radiographic images from the database for diagnosis, and make diagnostic reports to be stored in the database. Physicians can then consult these radiographic images and diagnostic reports. A real-time conference can be set up between a radiologist and a physician who are in different locations, for discussing a particular case or radiographic images can be retrieved from the database for diagnosis and conferencing. Simulations indicate the delay for displaying an image of 1 Mb from the local storage (hard disk) at a workstation is approximately 6.5 s.>

A simple protocol is presented for establishing and terminating circuit-switched communications within a metropolitan area network (MAN) that supports both circuit-switched communication (for voice and video) and packet-switched communication (for data and file transfers). A mathematical model of the MAN is used to study its performance with respect to the circuit-switched communication and its effects on the pocket-switched communication. The models are numerically solved by the mean-value-analysis algorithm.>