PDF of this tutorialAdvances in ATM technology provide the opportunity to create a global infrastructure providing high-speed data transmission integrated with voice and video services. To achieve this goal many new protocol specifications and standards have been developed to route data, emulate connectionless media, interwork ATM with existing LAN and WAN technologies, and guarantee the quality of service delivered across ATM backbones.
Construction of these large, scalable ATM networks presents a major challenge to ATM equipment developers, service providers, and end-users. Testing of ATM products must be performed in multiple stages:
- conformance verification (to specifications and standards)
- interoperability testing (match to other vendors' equipment)
- performance measurement (adequate throughput)
To adequately perform these types of tests on ATM equipment, the test engineers must use test equipment having the capability to do the following:
- analyze protocols on all seven layers of the protocol stack
- correlate data across ATM interworking boundaries (LAN–ATM, WAN–ATM)
- test all ATM service categories (i.e., ABR, UBR, etc.)
- measure QoS
- support complete automation of the test process
The complexity of ATM products will continue to increase as more networks are installed and additional services are introduced. For this reason, automation supporting all aspects of ATM testing is crucial for existing and future test equipment. Only automated test suites are capable of performing the variety and quantity of sophisticated testing sequences required to stress the operating limits of large high-speed ATM systems. These automated test suites will assist all classes of users to pinpoint ATM conformance and interoperability problems in addition to benchmarking and characterizing devices.
