Measuring ATM traffic: final report for New Zealand Telecom

Abstract

The report describes the development of a low-cost ATM monitoring system, hosted by a standard PC. The monitor can be used remotely returning information on ATM traffic flows to a central site. The monitor is interfaces to a GPS timing receiver, which provides an absolute time accuracy of better than 1 µsec. By monitoring the same traffic flow at different points in a network it is possible to measure cell delay and delay variation in real time, and with existing traffic. The monitoring system characterises cells by a CRC calculated over the cell payload, thus special measurement cells are not required. Delays in both local area and wide-area networks have been measured using this system. It is possible to measure delay in a network that is not end-to-end ATM, as long as some cells remain identical at the entry and exit points. Examples are given of traffic and delay measurements in both wide and local area network systems, including delays measured over the Internet from Canada to New Zealand.