ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode and is a switching technique used by telecommunication networks to encode data into small fixed-size packets called cells. These cells are ideal for Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) and transmit them over a physical medium.
Each ATM cell is 53 bytes long with a 5-byte header and a 48-byte payload. Since all the data is encoded into identical cells, the transmission is simple and uniform. This reduces packet overload and ensures that mixed traffic is handled efficiently. ATM is the core protocol used for Synchronous Optical Network (SONET), Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and other high-speed networks. ATM networks can easy to work with and are scalable both in size and speed.
