9314541 Turner As communication networks get larger and more complex, the need for careful planning in the design and configuration stage becomes more and more important. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks introduce several new issues in network design. First, they are multirate networks, supporting a wide range of connection bandwidths and must provide quality of service guarantees. Second, they must support multipoint virtual circuits, in addition to point-to-point. Third, they are inherently less predictable than prior communications networks, making it difficult to apply classical network design methods that rely on statistical traffic analysis. The research proposed here seeks to address these issues through the formulation of new approaches to network design that take a worst-case viewpoint and which seek to minimize the amount of information that network designers must provide, when specifying a network design. ***
