LANE

This term should be confused with the term “lane” which is a part of a roadway, usually present in the market. This term here is dealt with respect to the networking world, and in the networking world, this term refers to local area network emulation or LAN emulation. LANE is a group of software, or one can say it is a protocol that allows the existing networked applications, protocol and devices to run over the ATM backbone. This group of software or protocol was defined by the ATM Forum in the year 1995.

The second version of this technology was ratified by the ATM forum in the year 1997 and this new enhanced LANE was given the name of LANE 2.0. Most of the things in the second version were same as the first one; however, the second version included the support for QoS and other necessary features that were missing in the first version.

The main difference between the two networks LAN and ATM is that LANs are connectionless while ATM are connection oriented, hence this technology LANE, provides a mean for the ATM network and hardware to communicate with the existing Ethernet and Token Ring networks. The OSI model consists of 7 different layers and this protocol, LANE works at the layer 2 of the OSI model, hence, it is able to perform both the tasks, which are bridging and routing.

The main reason to introduce this technology to the networking world was to allow the different existing applications to access the ATM network through the MAC drivers, as if they were running on the LAN. There are two different standard interfaces present for the MAC drivers, by the name of NDIS and ODI. The main role of these interfaces is to specify that how the access to the MAC driver is performed.