A frame-level measurement apparatus for performance testing of ATM equipment

Performance testing of ATM equipment is here dealt with. In particular, the attention is paid to frame-level metrics, recently proposed by the ATM forum because of their suitability to reflect user-perceived performance better than traditional cell-level metrics. Following the suggestions of the ATM forum, more and more network engineers and production managers are nowadays interested in these metrics, thus increasing the need of instruments and measurement solutions appropriate to their estimation. Trying to satisfy this exigency, a new VXI-based measurement apparatus is proposed in the paper. The apparatus features a suitable software, developed by the authors, which allows the evaluation of the aforementioned metrics by making simply use of common ATM analyzers; only two VXI line interfaces, capable of managing both the physical and ATM layer, are, in fact, adopted. At first, some details about the hierarchical structure of the ATM technology as used as the main differences between frames, peculiar to the ATM adaptation layer, and cells characterizing the lower ATM layer are given. Then, both the hardware and software solutions of the measurement apparatus are described in detail with a particular attention to the measurement procedures implemented. At the end the performance of a new ATM device, developed by Ericsson, is assessed in terms of frame-level metrics by means of the proposed apparatus.