Requirements and prospects for multiservice business networks

The authors address new architectural concepts for organizing heterogeneous network components into a system framework. Reference scenarios foreseeable in the following decade are given, with the interaction of market trends and technical achievements taken into account. After a requirements analysis, a multiservice business network architecture suitable for early deployment and with the possibility of evolving into a future broadband integrated services digital network is proposed. This architecture, besides exploiting the capabilities of distributed switching, typical of metropolitan area network technology, avoids capacity limitations caused by the use of single-level shared-medium topologies