Customers' requirements for telecommunications services have been changing from simple point-to-point and single-medium communications to multiple-point and multiple-media, as well as changes in bandwidth requirements. In addition, customers' end stations (ES) will not be homogeneous, from POTS-like terminal to sophisticated multimedia workstation that handles various kind of media. This paper discusses communications management architectures that provide multimedia multipoint communications in a heterogeneous ESs environment. It summarizes existing communications management architectures, and discusses advanced architectures that provide multimedia communications, multipoint communications and heterogeneity handling capabilities in a flexible and efficient manner. The objectives of this architecture are to integrate multimedia multipoint communications capabilities into the network, and provide customers with versatile communications service request interface which can handle from plain single-medium point-to-point communications to multimedia multipoint communications. This paper especially focuses on the management functionalities for multimedia multipoint service fabrics (MMSF) which may be owned by the network provider, the third-party service provider, or the customer. It discusses variations of MMSF management protocol implementations in the case that the MMSF is owned by either of the three. It also discusses implementation of customers' various operations requests to the MMSF in the communication phase.

Overview of Cell Switch Router (CSR) and the CSR prototype system are described. CSR can simultaneously support both connection oriented IP flows and connectionless IP flows. CSR contains cell switch fabric and IP packet switch fabric to achieve high throughput IP forwarding. IP packets are forwarded either through a cut-thru packet transmission, in which packet are forwarded without reassembling IP packet nor IP header processing, or through a conventional hop-by-hop IP packet forwarding. This paper describes and proposes the mechanism to forward the connectionless IP packet flows at the CSR. A CSR prototype system has been developed. The CSR prototype system uses PVC connections to transfer the IP packets. With the CSR prototype system, we can make sure that CSR system can achieve a high throughput, i.e., 2.4 Gbps aggregated throughput. For end-to-end TCP/IP packet transmission, more than 90 Mbps can be achieved and realtime video transmission (30 Mbps video) can be achieved.

Broadband ISDN based on ATM technologies is expected to offer enhanced and sophisticated services to customers. Since ATM will first be introduced in the business communication world, it will be worth to discuss the future image of desirable ATM customer premises network (CPN). In this paper, we first consider the possible migration scenario of Broadband CPN and some important requirements for the realization of the scenario. Then, we discuss the key issues to be solved for future ATM-CPN, which include network topology, traffic control and connectionless communication services.

This paper proposes and performs the primary feasibility evaluation on Flow Attribute Notification Protocol (FANP), which is a protocol between neighbor CSR (Cell Switch Router) nodes for the management of cut-through packet forwarding, in order to apply label switching paradigm. In cut-through packet forwarding with label switching, a router doesn't have to perform conventional IP packet processing for the received packets. FANP indicates the mapping information between a data-link connection and a packet flow to the neighbor node. FANP defines two key procedures, i. e. , one is the VCID Notification Procedure, and the other is the Flow-ID Notification Procedure. The VCID Notification Procedure lets the label switching paradigm over the label swapped data-link, such as ATM link, though the other label switch architecture can not work over the label swapped data-link. The primary evaluation of FANP has been performed using the prototype system and with the actual packet statistics. The result shows that, with a corporate backbone level, the label switch router system with FANP would work well.