Distributed resource management and connection control for a multi-access interface to a broadband ISDN (BISDN)

Abstract

A customer premises network (CPN) provides a common communications fabric to efficiently integrate the traffic of multiple terminals on a common access interface to a BISDN. An important consideration in choosing a CPN architecture is to facilitate terminal portability and application transparency, so as to accommodate standard broadband terminals and applications, requiring only minor modification to adapt them from the standard BISDN interface to the multi-terminal environment. This paper explores the multi-faceted issues of CPN transparency with an emphasis on the evolving BISDN control and management architecture. We introduce a control architecture that conforms to a rigorous separation between ‘call control’ and ‘connection management’. This allows the CPN to be transparent to the user to network signalling exchange, and to participate only in the connection management via a remote resource management protocol. More generally, this scheme allows a call control entity located in a local exchange node (LEN) to manage a distributed set of resources such as switches and multiplexors (and CPNs). This is achieved through the definition of a standard interoperable interface between the central call control entity and the connection control entities which may be remotely located in various network elements. The features and functionality for such an interface, which we term the bearer connection control interface, are described within the framework of the OSI remote management architecture. A standard remote resource management protocol allows for the co-operative sharing of resources across administrative domains. Although the importance of such a scheme is particularly visible as applied to remote CPN management, it is useful in other application domains where it is advantageous to distribute management processes.