The ATM Forum has voted to begin work on the long- mooted I-PNNI Integrated Private Network-to-Network Interface standard, which is based on a proposal initiated by Bay Networks Inc. A further 15 networking vendors have since added their support for it. I-PNNI is intended extend the capabilities of the Asynchronous Mode PNNI standard – predominantly Quality of Service and scalability – to IP. In this way, it is designed to enable QoS routes to be decided using criteria based on the complete end-to-end network topology in order to provide QoS support for IP applications running over combined Asynchronous Transfer Mode and datagram networks. There is no word yet on when the ATM Forum expects to have a completed specification in place.
