Preparation

The project depends on three main domains: ATM, DCAN and RSVP.

A basic knowledge of ATM was sufficient, since Ariel provides an abstract interface to manipulate the ATM switch. Notions about ATM were necessary, especially about quality of service attributes, which were found in different books [#!ATM_princ!#,#!ATM_sol!#,#!ATM_intro!#,#!ATM_net!#].

I then had to learn what DCAN was, i.e. the aim of the project and the facilities provided to achieve it. Basically, the link between the project and DCAN is that the control architecture runs on a remote workstation and that an Ariel interface is used to communicate with the switch. Therefore, I had to read the Ariel documentation [#!Ariel!#].

An Object Request Broker (ORB) can be used to communicate with the Ariel server. Several DCAN projects (Dariel, Prospero [#!OSSA!#]) use DIMMA^2.1, which is a CORBA^2.2 compliant ORB. I therefore had a quick look to DIMMA's overview [#!DIMMA!#] to learn about ORBs.

The main part of my work consisted in learning everything about RSVP, which is quite complex because a lot of protocols are supported (IPv4, IPv6, multicasting, etc).

In order to keep track of the changes made during all the development cycle, I decided to use the Revision Control System (RCS). I also had to learn Java; the choice of Java will be discussed in section .

The preparation stage was quite long because I had to familiarise myself with a lot of new notions, and I also wanted to cleanly design the implementation before beginning to implement it.