Simulation of an ATM-FDDI Gateway

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks can support a wide variety of applications with varying data rates. Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) networks are targeted to support similar applications, but only in a LAN environment. Both of these networks are characterized by high data rates and low error rates. In addition, they can provide applications with varying degrees of performance guarantees. A problem of designing a high-performance gateway architecture for internetworking between these two important classes of networks was addressed in [Kapoor, 1991b]. An important part of the gateway design philosophy was to partition the internet functions into critical and non-critical paths. The critical path consists of per packet processing, an is implemented in hardware. The non-critical path consists of connection, resource, and route management, and is implemented in software. In order to establish the feasibility of this approach to the design of future high-speed gateways, an extensive simulation of the prosed gateway architecture was carried out. The primary focus of this paper is on the description of the simulation model, and its use in characterizing the performance of the proposed gateway architecture