On the design of an ATM interface with facilities for traffic monitoring and generation

This paper describes the design of an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network interface with additional facilities to allow it also to act as both a traffic monitor and traffic source. High resolution timing is provided to enable all received cells to be time stamped on arrival and the information passed back to the user. For transmission, a cell has an associated target transmission time and the transmit hardware will block the head of the transmit queue until the target time is reached