Basics of ATM
ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode and has
the following characteristics:
A Cell Switching technique
Working in the data link layer of the OSI model
The small, fixed-size (53-octet) cells make hardware implementations efficient and economical
ATM can be used on a number of various physical layers => it can easily adapt to new transmission techniques and transfer speeds
ATM can be used in WANs, MANs and LANs which should lead into seamless integration of services
ATM WAN infrastructure will mainly be based on SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) and SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) infrastructure