How Asynchronous Transfer Mode work?

Answer 1

The principle advantage is it's flexibility; it can be used to carry data, voice and video over the same physical medium. Traditionally, separate media was used for the different type of traffic, so a single medium solution saves money.

Answer 2

Main Features of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) Technology

ATM technology is expected to have an enormous impact on future distributed systems because of its following attractive features:

1. It enables high-bandwidth distributed applications by providing data transmission speeds of 155 Mbps, 622 Mbps and potentially 2.5 Gbps. This feature will make possible several new distributed applications such as applications based on video-on-demand techniques, video-conferencing applications and applications that need of access remote databases of multimedia data.

2. It provids high transmission seeds for both local and wide-area networks and services enabling high-powered distributed applications that previously had little hope of extending beyond LAN environments to be used in WAN environments as well.

3. It supports both the fundamental approaches to switching within a single integrated switching mechanism. This feature makes it suitable both for distributed applications that generate constant-bit-rate (CBR) traffic and distributed applications that generate variable-bit-rate (VBR) traffic.

4. It uses the concept of virtual networking to pass traffic between two locations.

5. In addition to point-to-point communication in which there is a single sender and a single receives, it can easily support multicasting facility in which there is a single sender but multiple receivers. Such a facility is needed for transmitting Broadcast Television to many houses at the same time.

6. It enables the use of a single network to efficiently transport a wide range of multimedia data such as text, voice, video, broadcast television and so on.

7. It flexible in the way it grants access o bandwidth. It enables supply of bandwidth on demand and allows billing network users on a per-cell basis. A user can say only for as much as they uses.

8. It is a scalable technology. It enables increase or decrease of such things as bandwidths and data rates and still maintains the architecture of the signaling process.

9. It has a fairly solid base of standards. It has adopted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and internationally standardized as the basis for the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network.