Broadband communication network architecture for business environments

The authors discuss several major changes in private networks and propose a node architecture based on cell-based switching. The most remarkable change is the growing role of personal computing terminals (PCTs) seen in both the personal computers and the workstations of today´s offices. This necessitates broadband communication facilities because of the rapidly improving performance of PCTs. Since these systems are information- and computing-resource-transparent, network configurations will have to change to accommodate PCTs and a variety of server resources. It is noted that the flexibility and adaptability offered by the proposed architecture will allow PCTs to reach their full performance potential. The authors introduce a laboratory model based on the proposed architecture and present experimental results