ATM Forum
The ATM Forum was founded in 1991 to be the industry consortium for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. It was a non-profit international organization. In its day, the ATM Forum was a vigorous industry body, creating over 200 implementation agreements.
ATM technology stabilized with the "Anchorage Accord", which established the baseline of ATM implementations. While ATM did not live up to every expectation, it remains an important core network technology. In 2004, the ATM Forum joined forces with the MPLS & Frame relay alliance to form the MFA Forum. The MFA Forum later merged with the IP/MPLS Forum.
Sampling of ATM Specifications
- ATM-MPLS Network Interworking
- Multi-Protocol Over ATM
- TM 4.1
- User-Network Interface
- B-ICI
- ANNI
- PNNI
- Frame-based ATM
- ILMI
- 622.08 Mbit/s physical layer
- Inverse ATM Mux
- Circuit Emulation Service
- ATM Security Framework
Circuit Emulation Service
A widely adopted specification to emerge from the ATM Forum was the Circuit Emulation Service specification (CES). This specification defined a method of creating a service out of mapping TDM DS0 and DS1/E1 Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy (PDH) signals into Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cells. It also supported J2 and DS-3 signals. The service was built around the ATM Adaption Layer 1 specification from the ITU. The 1.0 version was approved about 1995 and the 2.0 version was approved in January of 1997. [1].