Examine the usage of the mechanism of ATM to implement the new features offered by IPv6

Abstract

ATM networks are point to point networks that offer no connectionless broadcast or multicast capabilities on the ATM datalink. Some mechanism are needed on top of the ATM datalink to handle those protocols or function, such as IPv6, which rely on connectionless multicast capabilities. This dissertation describes a mechanism for adapting IPv6 multicast feature and its base protocols to ATM networks while maintaining the complete functionality and semantics of the IPv6 protocol. This is done by defining an IPv6-ATM convergence layer which posses functionality to preserve all the IPv6 multicast concepts and functionality while still taking advantage of the unique capabilities of ATM.