TABLE OF CONTENTS Khurram Kazi,
SMSC
Over the past few years the focus of the networking industry has shifted towards providing various services that seamlessly connect networks over different geographical locations, across the globe. These services go beyond the features and capabilities of the traditional packet (e.g. Frame Relay services) or Time Division Multiplexed (e.g. T1/E1, T3/E3 or STS-n/STM-n connections) technologies. Most of the leading networking service providers worldwide are racing to build integrated multiservice platforms that allow them to offer bundled services to their customers that can be provisioned almost instantly. From a service provider's point of view, these multiservice platforms allow improved flexibility in adding, migrating or removing customers. For example, as we have seen in the previous chapters, services that offer point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or multipoint-to-multipoint Ethernet connectivity over the metro or the wide area public networks have gained tremendous momentum and continue to grow. Likewise, multiple Storage Area Networks (SANs) residing in different locations are being connected via the metro or the wide area transport networks in various configurations. These new services that the transport networks are gearing up to provide are fuelling the evolution of ever increasing intelligent network elements.
This chapter covers chip-to-chip communications standards that serve as the key architectural building blocks of the network elements. Their usage is illustrated with generic hardware architectural...
