ATM Adaptation Layer 5 (AAL 5)

This adaptation layer is suitable for

connectionless services (class D). It is also used in the signalling AAL (SAAL) described in Chapter 10. It was proposed in reaction to AAL 3/4 which is unnecessarily complex.

AAL 5 Sublayers
The AAL 5 services are provided by the convergence sublayer (CS) and the SAR sublayer.
CS is further sub-divided into the SSCS and CPS.

Different SSCS protocols may be defined in order to support specific AAL users.
The SSCS may be null, which is the assumption

made in this section.

CPCS Sublayer
CPS provides a non-assured transfer of user-PDUs with any length that can vary from 1 byte to 65,535 bytes.
At the receiving side, CPS can detect erroneous CPS-PDUs and it can indicate that to the higherlevel application.

CPCS Sublayer
However, since it provides a non-assured service, it does not recover erroneous CPS-PDUs by retransmission.
This is left to a higher-level protocol, such as TCP. It also delivers user-PDUs in the order in which it received them.

CPCS Sublayer
CPS provides both message mode service and streaming mode service.
In message mode, it is passed a user-PDU which it

transfers in a single CPS-PDU. In streaming mode, it is passed several user-PDUs over a period of time which it blocks together and transports to the destination in a single CPS-PDU.

CPS Trailer

CPS Trailer
A user-PDU is encapsulated by CPS into a CPSPDU by adding a trailer, as shown in figure.
The following fields in the trailer have been

defined: Padding (Pad): It can be between 0 and 47 bytes long. The User-PDU can be up to 65,535 bytes The padding is made up of unused bytes which do not convey any information.

CPS Trailer
CPS user-to-user indication (CPS-UU): A 1-byte field used to transfer transparently CPS user-to-user information. Common part indicator (CPI):A 1-byte field to support future AAL 5 functions. It identifies the convergence service to be provided. Length: A 2-byte field used to indicate the length in bytes of the CPS-PDU payload, i.e. the user-PDU. CRC-32: This 4-byte field contains the FCS calculated by the transmitting CPS over the entire contents of the CPS-PDU

SAR Sublayer
The SAR sublayer fragments a CPS-PDU into a sequence of

48-byte segments, and each segment is carried in the payload of an ATM cell. There is no encapsulation at the SAR sublayer, as in AAL 3/4. However, the ATM cell that carries the last segment of a CPS-PDU is marked by setting the SDU type indication in its PTI field to 1. Specifically, each ATM cell that carries a segment of a CPS-PDU has its SDU type indication set to zero, except the ATM cell that carries the last segment of the CPS-PDU whose PTI field contains the indication SDU type=1.