TABLE OF CONTENTS Today, throughput on traditional Ethernet LANs suffers even more because users are running network-intensive software such as client-server applications, which cause hosts (workstations) to transmit more often and for longer periods of time.
The rapid growth rate of the Internet has generated a considerable amount of publicity and is perhaps subject to just as much debate. Expectations among users, providers, and the general public are currently at an all-time high. In short, the Internet is constantly changing the face of telecommunications. Its sheer size and growing importance to business means that consistent technical standards and common practices have to be implemented on a global scale. All the functionality and capacity that will be needed for the next generation of applications must also be included in these standards. Much greater control over resources must be allowed, providers must be able to guarantee performance, and scalability must be improved.
The concept of MANs is not new. They have been around since the early 1990s. In the early days, proprietary TDM rings constituted MANs and optical amplifiers accomplished the distance objectives. In the mid-1990s, ATM became the predominant technology to build MANs (ATM over SONET). The promise of ATM as the technology for converging data, voice, and video was responsible for its unanimous appeal. Most importantly, the inherent capabilities in ATM to interleave itself into the existing SONET/SDH rings made it the prime choice...
