What is ATM

ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode and it is a packet switching network and data link protocol that, which encodes the data packets into the fixed sized units called cells.   Each cell consists of 53 octets. It was first introduced in the 1980s for the telephone and data networks.  It has been successfully implemented in the WAN by many telecommunication companies of the world.  It has been widely deployed by the enterprises, banks and many big corporations that require the high speed voice, data and video communications by using the WAN solutions.

In the ATM networks, a connection has to be established between the two nodes so that they can send cells to each other.  The bit rates are either 155.520 Mbps or 622.080 Mbps.  The ATM networks can support the data transfer speed 10 gbps and the cells are transmitted synchronously to maintain the clock rate between the sender and the receiver. The ATM network consists of the ATM switches and the end nodes, which are interconnected with each other by the point-to-point ATM links and interfaces.  There are different bandwidth recommendations.