The department of Computer Science at the
University of Twente is investigating the possibilities of using
ATM in a production
environment
.
This would replace current Ethernet-based systems,
which are mainly used for applications using the
Internet Protocol, but also some broadcast
oriented services (e.g. remote uptime, remote users,
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) and
Network Information Service (NIS)).
Both LAN Emulation [AFLE95] and
Classical IP and ARP over ATM (RFC
1577, [ML94]) are considered. The problem is that simply using
existing Classical IP and ARP over ATM is not enough, because no
broadcast/multicast services are provided. The question is whether
adding support for multicasting to Classical IP over ATM is feasible
and if so, whether it will be faster and more efficient than IP over
LANE.
From this context, my problem statement was created: