Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The advent of high speed, wide area ATM networks introducs a "backwards compatibility" dilemma. While emerging ATM networks must be capable of transporting future applications such as digital voice and video, many of the design choices made to optimize ATM for voice and video make the transport of traditional data traffic difficult. This paper will address some of these issues and propose possible solutions. This paper presents a promising method of providing connectionless service by buidling a virtual connectionless network on top of a public ATM network with a subset of the switches acting as connectionless servers. This method provides low transfer delay and low cost to the user.