ATM

Abstract

Most of the networking technologies discussed so far are good at carrying computer-type data and they provide a reliable connection between two nodes. Unfortunately, they are not as good at carrying real-time sampled data, such as digitized video or speech. Real-time data from speech and video requires constant sampling and these digitized samples must propagate through the network with the minimum of delay (latency). Any significant delay in transmission can cause the recovered signal to be severely distorted or for the connection to be lost. Ethernet, Token Ring and FDDI simply send the data into the network without first determining whether there is a communication channel for the data to be transported (and rely on the Transport layer to create a reliable connection).