ATM NETWORK TESTING AND MEASUREMENT

This contribution addresses some very general problems of testing and measuring in ATM networks. The paper outlines important aspects of the basic types of test such as conformance, functionality and performanc e. Furthermore, it highlights the several aspects and problems of test s at the level of an interface, a switch and a whole network. As ATM t raffic has almost no structure, it is impossible to make rules for tes ting and measurement from traffic modeling. We demonstrate the limitat ions of the standardized performance parameters, which are generally u sed as estimators. This e.g. shows that it is possible to obtain with the same estimator completely different cell loss ratios for the same traffic flow.