AAL5 at a Gigabit for a Kilobuck

Abstract

We present a novel LAN that has been designed to meet three criteria: it should be low cost, support standard protocols, and provide high performance. The LAN interconnects many workstations in a ring topology with a link rate of 1 Gbit/s. The packet format is the same as that of a B-ISDN cell except that our packets can have arbitrary length. The network also provides hardware support for ATM Adaptation Layer 5 as weIl as TCP/IP. We have implemented the ring network and we describe a network interface card which provides hardware support for critical functions such as calculating checksums. This card is used in conjunction with a second card that supports a single-copy implementation of the TCP/IP protocols. The application-to-application throughput has been measured at rates in excess of 200 Mbit/s between two workstations.