Network Aspects of Broadband ISDN

Abstract

The emerging Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (BISDNs) are expected to be flexible, supporting a wide spectrum of services and infrastructure applications, and responsive to evolving customer needs. The networks are also expected to be cost-effective, supporting diverse services on a common platform, and highly manageable, providing unified operations and customer control. Meeting all these expectations represents a major challenge in the design and implementation of BISDN networks. This paper introduces the basic structure of BISDN networks by describing a network reference model and the BISDN Protocol Reference Model. It also describes BISDN functions for signaling and call control, network management and operations and maintenance (OAM), traffic management and congestion control, and network performance and quality of service. The evolution of the BISDN networks is also presented, including an example of a BISDN network interworking with service-dependent networks.