ATM stands for "Asynchronous Transfer Mode". It is primarily driven by telecommunications companies and is a proposed telecommunications standard for Broadband ISDN. It is the most widely studied and implementewd form of Cell Networking. It is the complement of STM ( Synchronous Transfer Mode ) ATM offers high speed, can be used for both local area and wide area networks,and supports a variety of applications including real-time audio and video as well as conventional data communication.
The Basic component of an ATM network is a special purpose electronic switch designed to transfer data at extremely high speed. A typical small switch can connect between 16 and 32 computers. To permit data communication at high speed, each connection between a computer and an ATM switch uses a pair of optical fibers. Physically , a host interface board plugs into a computer's bus. The interface hardware includes a light emitting diode ( LED) or a miniature laser along with the circuitry needed to convert data into pulses of light that travel down the fiber to the switch . The interface also contains the hardware needed to sense pulses of light coming from the switch and convert them back into data bits in electronic form. Since a given fiber can carry light in only one direction, a connection requiresa pair of fibers to allow the computer to both send and receive data
Some of the aspects about ATM that need to be elaborated on are listed below.