Internet applications over native ATM

Current Internet applications cannot take advantage of the variety of service classes offered by ATM networks. This is due to the stacking, without specific scheduling mechanisms, of a best-effort network layer on top of ATM. Simultaneously, few native ATM applications have been written specifically in this networking framework. We propose an architecture for running TCP-based applications over ATM. This architecture relies on the standard TCP protocol and offers at the socket layer the means to specify an ATM traffic contract. This gives an immediate native ATM access to a rich set of familiar applications. It also helps satisfying the increasing need of resource control for Internet applications. We have developed TCP-ONIP (TCP over non-existent IP), a prototype implementation of this approach. The necessary adaptation steps are shown in the case of the Web.