It goes without
saying that we are heading towards a networked world; a world where networking
technologies will play a very important role in our lives. Be it the railway
booking counter, or automated banking, be it the ubiquitous Internet, or
the global wireless telephony systems, a life without networks is unconceivable.
Among the plethora of
networking technologies that have emerged over the last decade, ATM is
considered to be a breakthrough one. The popularity and pervasiveness of
ATM increases lies in the fact that it seamlessly integrates local area
network, and wide area network- a concept also referred to as single network
for desktop-to-the-core. Moreover, ATM provides a single platform for voice,
video and data, thereby leveraging the process of network convergence.
Apart from this, ATM also provides quality of service. All these factors
are considered unique selling points of ATM technology.
When we first laid our
hands on ATM technology and wanted to know more on the subject, we found
to our surprise that there was hardly any book that provided a conceptual
treatment to ATM. This was despite the fact that ATM technology had attracted
widespread interest. Majority of the books were a shadow of ATM standards,
derived from ITU-T and ATM Forum publications. Moreover, these books had
too many underlying assumptions and were hopefully inadequate in giving
an insight into the topic. The concepts got hidden in too many abbreviations
and too many jargons. The result was that people were more concerned with
whether ATM was a Telecommunication network or a Datacommunication network,
rather than trying to understand what either of them means. We also observed
that authors of technical books wrote with the assumption that technical
stuff ought to be complicated because it is technical. Contrary to the
above view point, we believed that everything is more or less simple unless
made otherwise.
Given this, we felt a
need to write a book on the subject that was simple, and easy to understand;
a book that could solve the problems that we were facing when we were studying;
a book that provides a comprehensive overview of ATM, a book that is simple
to understand, and a book that offered fewer assumptions. This provided
us the motivation to write a book.
Around the same time,
we got an opportunity to work on the development of ATM signaling software.
This project provided us in-depth knowledge of ATM because signaling covers
almost every aspect of ATM. Since then, we have worked on a number of projects
on ATM, as well as on related technologies like Frame Relay (FR), and Internet
Protocol (IP). These projects have provided us the requisite technical
know-how to write this book.
This book was written
in nearly 2 years time. During the first half of the activity, Pankaj was
actively involved in writing the manuscript, after which he left for US
to pursue MS at The Ohio State University. Since then he has contributed
by reviewing the manuscript and providing miscellaneous support.
Sumit Kasera
and Pankaj Sethi
