The goal of this research is to provide a framing structure for a sequence of ATM cells which carry multimedia traffic. We will redefine the concept of a connection in the context of cell streams, show how to identify the starting and ending points of connections, and investigate the signaling and hardware support. A new Multimedia Application Adaptation Layer (MAAL) protocol is proposed as an application of this concept. The resolution technique being proposed may reduce the processing overhead when cells travel through the switches. Furthermore, it may simplify the traffic scheduling at the application level and re-synchronize the multimedia traffics through the Asynchronous Transfer Mode network interface.
