ATM WAN PERFORMANCE TOOLS, EXPERIMENTS, AND RESULTS

Practical experiments in a wide-area ATM network environment are essen tial to gain a better understanding of the factors affecting ATM perfo rmance. This article summarizes the main lessons learned through the a uthors' practical experiences with ATM and how these can be applied to performance tuning. In order to achieve maximum performance from an A TM WAN, factors ranging from the transport protocol to the equipment u sed and the network conditions must be carefully taken into considerat ion. The authors also discuss some of the software-based throughput me asurement tools available for the evaluation of high speed network per formance, with particular emphasis on NetSpec.