Smart IP switching: A hybrid system for fast IP-based network backbones

The process of routing, that is, the handling of Internet Protocol (IP) packets at layer 3 (the network layer), is a potential bottleneck in large intranets and the public Internet. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) provides a hardware capability of switching cells at very high speeds at layer 2 (the link layer). A number of schemes for supporting IP over ATM hardware have emerged in recent years. These techniques may be broadly categorised by the approach they employ to set up paths through the network; namely, traffic-driven and control-driven. We propose a hybrid scheme, which while being essentially traffic-driven, exhibits advantages of both the traffic-driven and control-driven approaches.