ATM for LANs:Traditional Local Area Networks(LANs) like Ethernet, Token
Ring and Token Bus are limited in speed(10Mb) and thus are limited to particular
type of (mainly data) application. For multimedia applications, the bandwidth
requirement is high and the information is a combination of voice, video and data
and it requires a transfer mode capable of transporting and switching these
different types of information. ATM satisfies this requirement for LANs and ATM
Forum was created to specify the interfaces for ATM LANs. ATM LANs may be
used to interconnect multiple LANs and also to connect to powerful workstations
and servers. ATM Forum is a non-profit organization founded in 1991 and is
actively involved in the definition of ATM LAN and also in the eventual deployment
of a universal BISDN network. A simple ATM LAN can be shown as follows.
ATM allows transmission capacities upto 622 Mbit/s which is enough for most LAN applications. ATM LANs are expected to be mainly star configured and they have simpler network management functions. Deployment of ATM in LANs will also stimulate faster deployment of the public BISDN.
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