Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Zaid Mahmood Farhat

BEE-FA06-099
Department of Electrical
Engineering.
 Agenda
• Introduction • Switching
• Design Goals • Physical Connections
• Problems Solved • Layers (Reference
• Structure Model)
• Cell • Addressing
• Devices • LAN
• Virtual Connections • Advantages
• Identification of Path • Disadvantages
• Services • References
Intro…
ATM is
• Connection oriented switching
technology
• Handles digital data format
• Consist upon 53-byte cells (Individually, a cell is
processed asynchronously relative to other related cells and is
queued before being multiplexed over the transmission path.)

• Prespecified bit rates are either 155.520

Mbps or 622.080 Mbps.
• Speeds on ATM networks can reach 10
Gbps.
Intro…
• Basically Asynchronous Transfer Mode
(ATM) is the cell relay protocol designed
by the ATM Forum and adopted by the
ITU-T.
• In fact, ATM can be thought of as the
"highway" of the information
superhighway.
 Design Goals
• Want to be
– Higher data rate or bandwidth
– Wide area connectivity without lowering
the effectiveness
– Implemented Inexpensively
– Compatible to most of telecom hierarchies
– Connection Oriented
– Converting from soft to hardware.
 Problem Solved practically
• Frame Networks
• Mixed Network traffic
• Cell Networks
• Asynchronous TDM
Structure or Architecture…
• ATM is a cell-switched network.
• The user access devices, called the
endpoints, are connected through a
user-to-network interface (UNI) to the
switches inside the network.
• The switches are connected through
network-to-network interfaces (NNIs).
 ATM Cell
• ATM transfers information in fixed-size
units called cells.
• Each cell consists of 53 octets, or bytes.
The first 5 bytes contain cell-header
information (contain the information about the ATM
network), and other 48 contain the payload
(user information).
Cell Header Format

• Generic Flow
Control
(GFC)
• Payload Type
(PT)
• Cell Loss
Priority
(CLP)
• Header Error
Control
(HEC)
 ATM Devices
• ATM Switches: An ATM switch is responsible for
cell transit through an ATM network. It can reads and
updates the cell header information and quickly
switches the cell to an output interface toward its
destination.
• ATM Endpoints: An ATM endpoint (or end
system) contains an ATM network interface adapter.
 Virtual Connection
• Connection between two endpoints is
accomplished through transmission
paths (TPs), virtual paths (VPs), and
virtual circuits (VCs).
• A transmission path (TP)  Physical
connection (wire, cable, satellite, and so on)
between an endpoint and a switch or
between two switches.
Virtual Connection
• A virtual path (VP) provides a
connection or a set of connections
between two switches.
• Cell networks are based on virtual
circuits (VCs). All cells belonging to a
single message follow the same virtual
circuit and remain in their original order
until they reach their destination.
Simple
relationship of
TP, VP and VC.

Practical
relationship of
VP and VC.
 Identifications for paths
• The designers of ATM created a
hierarchical identifier with two levels: a
virtual path identifier (VPI) “For specific VP”
and a virtual-circuit identifier (VCI) “For
particular VC in side the VP”.

Define the identifiers in pairs

as one is VPI and other is
VCI.
Identification (Contd…)
• For UNI and NNI we use identifiers of
different length as shown in figure.
 ATM services
• Two types of services are 1) PVC and 2) SVC
• PVC: Permanent Virtual Circuits allows direct
connectivity between sites. In this way, a PVC
is similar to a leased line.
• SVC: Switched Virtual Circuits is created and
released dynamically and remains in use only
as long as data is being transferred. In this
sense, it is similar to a telephone call.
 ATM Switching
• ATM uses switches to route the cell
from a source endpoint to the
destination endpoint.
• A switch routes the cell using both the
VPIs and the VCIs.
ATM Layers (Reference Model)
ATM consist upon three basic layer
format as
»Physical Layer
»ATM Layer
»AAL (ATM Application Adapter
Layer)
ATM Reference Model
• The ATM architecture uses a logical model to describe the
functionality that it supports.
• ATM functionality corresponds to the physical layer and
data link layer of the OSI reference model.
• The ATM reference model is composed of the following
planes, which span all layers:
• Control—This plane is responsible for generating and
managing signaling requests.
• User—This plane is responsible for managing the transfer
of data.
• Management—This plane contains two components:
– Layer management manages layer-specific functions,
such as the detection of failures and protocol problems.
– Plane management manages and coordinates
functions related to the complete system.
ATM Reference Model
• Physical layer—Analogous to the physical layer of the OSI
reference model, the ATM physical layer manages the medium-
dependent transmission.
• ATM layer—Combined with the ATM adaptation layer, the
ATM layer is roughly analogous to the data link layer of the
OSI reference model. The ATM layer is responsible for
– the simultaneous sharing of virtual circuits over a physical link (cell
multiplexing) and passing cells through the ATM network (cell relay).
– To do this, it uses the VPI and VCI information in the header of each
ATM cell.
– Also use to interface between physical and adaption layer.
• ATM adaptation layer (AAL)—Combined with the ATM
layer, the AAL is roughly analogous to the data link layer of the
OSI model. The AAL is responsible for
– isolating higher-layer protocols from the details of the ATM processes.
– The adaptation layer prepares user data for conversion into cells and
segments the data into 48-byte cell payloads.
ATM reference model
ATM Application Adaption Layer (AAL)
• AAL has four subparts as
– AAL1
– AAL2
– AAL3/4
– AAL5
 AAL1
• AAL1, a connection-oriented service, is
suitable for handling constant bit rate
sources (CBR), such as voice and
videoconferencing.
• AAL1 requires timing synchronization
between the source and the
destination.
• Most important task is to synchronize
the bytes un the ATM cell.
 AAL2
• Traffic type has timing requirements
like CBR but tends to be bursty in
nature. This is called variable bit rate
(VBR) traffic.
• The AAL2 process uses 44 bytes of the
cell payload for user data and reserves
4 bytes of the payload to support the
AAL2 processes.
 AAL3/4
• AAL3/4 supports both connection-oriented
and connectionless data.
• An AAL 3/4 PDU (Protocol Data Unit) header
consists of Type, Sequence Number, and
Multiplexing Identifier fields.
 AAL5
• AAL5 is the primary AAL for data and supports both
connection-oriented and connectionless data.
• AAL5 also is known as the simple and efficient
adaptation layer (SEAL)
• For all cells except the last, a bit in
• The Payload Type (PT) field is set to 0 to indicate
that the cell is not the last cell in a series that
represents a single frame.
• For the last cell, the bit in the PT field is set to 1.
ATM Physical Connections
• ATM supports two types of connections:
point-to-point and point-to-multipoint.
• Point-to-point connects two ATM end systems
and can be unidirectional (one-way
communication) or bidirectional (two-way
communication).
• Point-to-multipoint connects a single-source
end system (known as the root node) to
multiple destination end systems (known as
leaves). Such connections are unidirectional
only.
ATM LAN
• ATM can be implemented in the LAN as
follows
• Pure ATM Architecture: Here an ATM switch is
used to connect the stations in a LAN, in
exactly the same way stations are connected
to an Ethernet switch.
• Legacy ATM Architecture: Here the stations
on the same LAN can exchange data at the
rate and format of traditional LANs (Ethernet,
Token Ring, etc.) and ATM act as the
backbone.
Pure ATM
Architecture

Legacy ATM
Architecture
Advantages
• ATM supports voice, video and data allowing
multimedia and mixed services over a single network.
• High evolution potential, works with existing
technologies
• Provides the best multiple service support
• Supports delay close to that of dedicated services
• Able to use all common physical transmission paths
like SONET.
• Ability to connect LAN to WAN
• High speed Mbps and possibly Gbps
Disadvantages
• Flexible to efficiency’s expense, at present, for any
one application it is usually possible to find a more
optimized technology
• Cost, although it will decrease with time
• New customer premises hardware and software are
required
• Competition from other technologies -100 Mbps
FDDI, 100 Mbps Ethernet and fast Ethernet.
References
• Behroz A. Frouzen, “Data Networking and Communication”
edition 4th
• Cisco Systems, “Internetworking Technologies Handbook”
edition 4th
• Roger L. Freeman, “Fundamentals of Telecommunications” 1999
ISBN: 0-471-22416-2
• Microsoft ScinTech Library
• IEEE Explore
• Gilbert Held , “Understanding Data Communications” 6th edition,
published by New Riders Publishing
• http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci2
13790,00.html
• http://www.tech-faq.com/atm.shtml
• http://en.wikipedia.org
for obsession