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Factors influencing ATM adapter throughput

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Abstract

Analytical and experimental evaluations show that ATM adapters can perform quite close to their designed limits, provided that they are used in a properly configured environment with series resources capable of sustaining the desired throughputs. While the media speed may be 155, 100 or 25 Mbps, there are a number of factors that will determine the final achieved maximum throughput observed by a user of a ATM adapter. One is the overhead inherent to ATM, such as the 5 byte ATM header that accompanies every 48 bytes of data sent. Others are inherent in the protocol used in the communication layers above ATM (e.g., pacing and retransmission associated with TCP/IP). Still others are dependent upon the processor speed and operating system used by the adapter host system. This paper discusses those parameters that, based on our experience, can have a considerable impact on the throughput of an ATM adapter. Turboways1 25, 100 and 155 ATM adapter measurements illustrate these issues. These represent end-to-end (application layer-to-application layer) throughput measurements, involving all supporting hardware (workstations, 8260 ATM hub/switch, 8282 ATM concentrator, etc.) and all protocol layers, operating system, etc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Networking Hardware Division, IBM Corporation, 27709, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

    Andrew Rindos, Steven Woolet, David Cosby & Leonard Hango

  2. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Box 8206, 27695, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Mladen Vouk

Authors
  1. Andrew Rindos
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  2. Steven Woolet
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  3. David Cosby
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  4. Leonard Hango
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  5. Mladen Vouk
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Additional information

This work was supported in part through the 1994 and 1995 IBM SUR grants, the IBM-NCSU ATM partnership effort and NSF award ACS-9418960.

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Rindos, A., Woolet, S., Cosby, D. et al. Factors influencing ATM adapter throughput. Multimed Tools Appl 2, 253–271 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00455021

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