Cell Level Measurements of Atm-25 Traffic

A system for capturing complete cell level header and timing information for bi-directional ATM-25 links is described. The system is able to measure and synchronise multiple links simultaneously. Off the shelf ATM-25 NIC equipment and standard PCs are used giving a very low cost system. Headers for all cells are captured to disk and timing is accurate to sub-microsecond times. Measurements of video, file transfer traffic and artificially generated traffic are reported. Future extensions of the system to higher bit rates and optical links are briefly discussed.