Originally intended for application to B-ISDN, which is carrier oriented, ATM technology has been actively studied for application to LAN based environments since the beginning of the 1990s. One of the most notable things in LAN area is development of a rich set of application services. A number of technical specifications for major application services have been developed, which include LAN Emulation, IP over ATM, Multi-protocol over ATM, Voice and Telephony over ATM, as well as Native ATM services such as MPEG2 over ATM. Development of these new services raises new challenges related to traffic management. Keeping pace with the development, a number of traffic control mechanisms have also been developed to maximize the performance of these services. Traffic control and management techniques, however, are still in the early stage of their learning curve. Network engineers are facing challenging problems related to traffic management. This paper reviews major service-related technologies and discusses traffic management issues associated with these services. Especially, it describes the real world traffic management as practiced by average network engineers with state-of-the-art products. Although the thechnology developments have advanced through many research works, there seems to be a considerable gaps between the practice and principles. This paper discusses the traffic issues of ATM LAN from this perspective and points out some challenges for the future. Most of the difficulties in handling traffic issues stems from the differences in implementation details. To alleviate this difficulty, the introduction of a unified node model which describes the traffic handling capability of ATM nodes in sufficient detail is suggested.

A traffic engineering method has been developed to meet the requirements for efficient bandwidth dimensioning and for a practical and consolidated network design method. It characterizes the offered-traffic burstiness on a transit link by using time-series measurement of the aggregate traffic. It estimates future traffic characteristics based on the average traffic volume at that time which is easily derived from trend analysis, i. e. , an x% increase in bandwidth each year and gives the required link capacity. Simulation showed that the parameters estimated using this method fit the actual behavior of a network well. This method enables an appropriate bandwidth to be allocated to a transit link without having to estimate the specific traffic characteristics for each connection over the link. Once the burstiness parameter and its trend have been identified based on this method, it is possible to use a simple traffic measurement method to detect changes in network traffic and feed them back to the engineering procedure.

The introduction of Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDNs) poses a variety of new questions on telecommunications network design and planning. Furthermore, the formulation of traditional network design and planning problems need to be revisited in the ISDN context. This paper presents an overview of the recent progress and new challenges in developing ISDN design and planning methodologies that exploit revolutionary new telecommunications technologies. It will cover some important issues for ISDN design and planning, and will concentrate on three issues that are of particular importance: Design of networks with digital information transfer capabilities, design of networks with advanced network/traffic control techniques, and use of reliability objectives for network design and planning.