Emulating ATM network impairments

Summary form only given, as follows. The paper discusses a new product for the HP broadband series test system. The HP E219 ATM network impairment Emulator allows telecommunications network equipment manufacturers to emulate an asynchronous transfer mode network in the laboratory. (ATM being a new networking technology that is currently being deployed for time sensitive traffic in high speed LAN/WAN.) Information is encoded into short, fixed length cells of 53 bytes, consisting of 48 bytes of payload and five bytes of header. ATM has many advantages over other networking technologies like frame relay and SMDS. Its fixed and short length cells allows multiplexers and switches to route data directly in hardware, as opposed to the slower, software driven approach required with variable length.