An ATM traffic measurement tool

Standards bodies and equipment vendors have made significant progress in the development and implementation of the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) scheme as the transport vehicle fo high-speed multimedia networks. When using ATM for defense, national security, emergency, and disaster recovery applications, a key factor is for ATM to meet the priority requirements for transmission and signaling in hostile, emergency, and crisis situations. Although theoretical and simulation studies have been carried out on this, measurement equipment and techniques are required to analyze real ATM traffic and to compare the data with theoretical models. The authors describe equipment and methodologies being used in an ATM testbed. In this testbed, an ATM traffic analyzer generates ATM traffic based on a user-selectable statistical distribution. At the receiving end, the traffic analyzer produces performance metrics to validate ATM switch and network performance. The performance parameters being measured include ATM cell loss, cell delay, cell delay variation, and cell error for traffic with various priority levels