Integration and Performance Testing of IP over ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) oers the benet of high speed multimedia transfer of information. However, even if the use of ATM technology spreads, it will not instantly replace all the existing Local Area Networks (LANs) based on other network protocol stacks, such as TCP/IP. The need to interface existing connectionless LANs with connection oriented ATM networks and the need to run TCP/IP applications on an ATM network have led to the development of several software packages that provide the necessary translation services. This paper deals with two such packages: Classical IP over ATM and LAN Emu-lation. A brief description of the various protocols involved is discussed, followed by a description of the data transfer process for one of the two packages, and a report on the problems encountered and solutions found in integrating them into an existing ATM network. Performance measurements are provided and an overall evaluation of the two methods is included