The approach indicated in section two of the MERIT paper is a common approach that was generally approved in both the NANOG meeting and a NAP participant meeting that was held during the Toronto IETF.
And this is the approach two of the NAP providers are planning to implement their NAPs initially.
So, I suggest the MERIT paper should not be viewed as the only or desired method of connecting to an ATM NAP. It should be carefully read as the documentation of a successful experiment.
This paper describes a solution to connect the RS and do routing on the currently planned ATM-NAP technology (i.e. RFC1490/AAL5) based on the availability of the products. If we want to connect to the planned ATM-NAP now, that is the approach. The paper does not address the issue of selecting protocol stacks for the ATM-NAPs. It is beyond the scope of the paper. We have a revised version which clarifies this point. --jessica