The DCAN project, developed at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, extracts the control and management of ATM switches from the devices themselves and delegates them to external workstations.
In order to do that, an Open ATM Switch Control interface has been developed, called Ariel [#!Ariel!#]. Ariel has a server-client architecture: the server runs directly on the switch, and the clients run on remote workstations. A client can do administrative operations such as setting up connections, using the Ariel interface to communicate with the switch. This mechanism provides a totally generic interface, and the requests done by the clients are therefore independent from the type of switch.
We end up with a distributed control of the network: what is called the control architecture is the software running on a set of external workstations which manages the network. If the network is organised that way (see figure ![[*]](crossref.png)
), the switches only have to send the ATM cells to their destination and do not care about signalling anymore.
