HP Labs Technical Reports

AAL5 at a Gigabit for a Kilobuck

Watson, Greg; Banks, David; Calamvokis, Costas; Dalton, Chris; Edwards, Aled; Lumley, John

HPL-93-37

Keyword(s):

Abstract: We present a novel LAN that has been designed to meet three goals: low cost, standards and protocols, and high performance. The LAN uses a ring topology to interconnect many workstations to each port on packet switch. The physical layer operates at one Gbit/s. The packet format is that defined by the CITT for B-ISDN, but the length is variable. The network also provides hardware support for ATM Adaptation Layer 5, as this AAL5 will be widely used for data transfer as well as signaling. 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 of up to 200Mbit/s between two workstations.

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