Global ATM Testbed and Applications

Global communication and information exchange has become a critical factor for success. Computer supported collaboration tools should be used together with faster networks in order to solve these challenges. With the availability of an information highway, international and intercontinental collaboration becomes the usual form of daily work. Time and distance are no longer barriers. Colleagues in different locations around the world can contact each other easier and can discuss topics as they were just working next door. Multimedia teleservices, like conferencing and working in virutal Environments, need global, large bandwidth computer networks to transmit their simulation, audio and video data on demand. The main issue of such applications is that people located anywhere can meet together in interactive Vrtual Environments to exchange knowledge and manpower with advanced computer technologt in order to give support and help werever it is needed. CRCG and IGD have estabished a distrib uted Transatlantic Research And Development Environment (TRADE) that offers interactive multimedia communication and collaboration services on top of different network technologies. The testbed is able to support Internet traffic, ISDN links as well as native ATM cell based applications. Its possible to test critical QoS network parameters, like latency, jitter and cell loss in different scenarios.