8Routing in ATM Networks
8.1 Introduction
Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a connection‐oriented switching and network transmission technique introduced in the late 1980s. ATM was introduced in the days when public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) were in common use supporting only voice or data. ATM brought in the technology to support voice, video, and data over a single network. This is a full duplex transmission technology that supports a variety of physical media such as UTP cable and fiber optic cable. ATM can be used in a small LAN as well as between two or more LANs spread across wide distances and connected over a WAN.
As ATM is connection oriented, it ensures delivery of cells in order and with high accuracy. Most of the ATM switching function is implemented in the hardware, and the least number of operations are performed through software. This enhances the speed of the system. Operability over fiber optic cable makes it free from noise interference during transmission and can help ATM reach gigabit transmission rates.
An ATM packet size [1] is fixed at 48 bytes for payload and 5 bytes for the header, leading to a total size of 53 bytes. The fixed packet ...
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