The virtual path identifier and its applications for routeing and priority of connectionless and connection‐orientated services
Jay L. Adams · International Journal of Digital & Analog Cabled Systems · 1988
Abstract A feature of ATM networks is that they can be configured with paths routed through a number of switching stages which can each take many thousands of connections and which can each be assigned capacity dynamically. A large number of such paths, known as virtual paths, can be established from each network node without consuming much network capacity, since they can be assigned limited or zero capacity when unused. Virtual paths can be used to provide faster connection set‐up times or a faster transfer time for connectionless messages, and greater routeing flexibility. In particular they can be used to provide very fast transfer of signalling information between any two processors in a set of many thousands configured as a distributed processing control plane. They can also be used to indicate quality of service (QOS) values. These different issues are discussed in this paper, leading to some recommendations on the size of the virtual path identifier (VPI) field suitable for signalling and connectionless and connection‐orientated services.