ABR-API for ABR aware applications and protocols

Although ATM is being deployed as the underlying transport of Internet communications, ATM network capabilities such as QoS control are not utilized by higher layer protocols and/or applications. Focusing on ABR, this paper proposes the ABR-API which allows higher layers to use ABR capabilities directly, and addresses some ABR aware applications and protocols. It further addresses functions and implementations of ABR-API as user-plane capability and discusses TCP-ABR interworking as a usage example of ABR-API to achieve lossless end-to-end communication under fluctuating network resource availability.