ATM

The acronym ATM stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode and refers to a communication protocol which can be used to transfer data, videos and speech. ATM operates on layers one to three of the OSI layer model and is characterised by very short lag, good scalability and time transparency. A key characteristic of asynchronous transfer mode transmission protocol is the fixed length of ATM cells. The cells are 53 bytes in size and have 48 bytes of usable data along with five bytes of cell header. The cells are transferred via asynchronous time multiplexing.