Atm Network Basics; Atm Overview - 3Com CoreBuilder 7000 Operation Manual

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ATM Overview

ATM N
ETWORK
This chapter provides basic concepts and information about:


ATM Overview


ATM Cell Structure


ATM Layers


Functional Planes


Designing ATM Networks


ATM Network Examples
In 1986, the Comité Consulatif International Télégraphique et
Téléphonique (CCITT), now known as the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU), formed a study group to explore the
concept of a high-speed, integrated network to uniformly handle voice,
data, and a variety of other services. Their research resulted in
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a telecommunications concept
defined by CCITT and ANSI standards for carriage of a complete range of
user traffic on any User-to-Network Interface (UNI) and to facilitate
multimedia networking between high-speed devices at multi-megabit
speeds.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a high-speed networking
technology that utilizes packets of a fixed length. ATM uses logical
connections to provide quality of service guarantees which enable
disparate traffic such as data, voice, and video to be carried over the
same local or wide area network.
Using this connection-oriented networking technology, centered by a
switch, you can set up a great number of virtual connections to support
multiple applications through the same physical connection. The
switching technology enables dedicated bandwidth for each application,
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ASICS