Cell Relay Archive

["C. M. Heard" <heard@vvnet.com>]

"William H. Yost" <yostw@tce.com>  wrote:
> Are LANE (Lan Emulation) and RFC1483 alternative methods of using an ATM
> network to carry Ethernet traffic or is RFC1483 just the way that you break
> up an ethernet frame into multiple ATM cells and must be used along with the
> LANE specification?

RFC1483 specifies standard ways in which various types of PDUs (not just
Ethernet frames) may be encapsulated within an AAL5 CPCS SDU (i.e., an
AAL5 CPCS-PDU payload field).  PDU encapsulation is only one part of the
infrastructure needed to carry data traffic over ATM.  RFC1483 does not
address those other concerns.  That is left to other documents.  On the
the other hand, the encapsulation specifications in RFC1483 are general
enough to be used by many XXX-over-ATM specifications, the most notable
of these being Classical IP over ATM.  RFC2684, which was published in
1999, updates and replaces RFC1483.  Appendix D of that document discusses
several XXX-over-ATM schemes that the encapsulation specifications.

LANE, by contrast, is a specification for using ATM to emulate a LAN.
It is one specific technique for carrying LAN traffic over ATM.  It
uses its own encapsulation technique which is similar to (but not
identical with) one of those in RFC1483.

Mike