ATM Forum

The ATM Forum was a non-profit industry consortium founded in 1991 to promote Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology. The founding president and chairman was Fred Sammartino of Sun Microsystems. The ATM Forum created over 200 implementation agreements.

History

In 1996 ATM technology stabilized with the "Anchorage Accord", which established the baseline of ATM implementations. While ATM did not live up to every expectation, it remained an important core network technology.
The Frame Relay Forum also started in 1991. The MPLS Forum.
In 2005, the ATM Forum joined forces with the MFA to form the MFA Forum, which was renamed to be the IP/MPLS Forum.
In May 2009 the IP/MPLS Forum merged with the Broadband Forum.

Sampling of specifications

ATM-MPLS Network Interworking
Multi-Protocol Over ATM
TM 4.1
User-Network Interface
B-ICI
ANNI
PNNI
Frame-based ATM
ILMI
622.08 Mbit/s physical layer
Inverse ATM Mux
Circuit Emulation Service
ATM Security Framework

Circuit Emulation Service

A widely adopted specification to emerge from the ATM Forum was the Circuit Emulation Service specification. This specification defined a method of creating a service out of mapping TDM DS0 and DS1/E1 Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy signals into Asynchronous Transfer Mode cells. It also supported J2 and DS-3 signals. The service was built around the ATM Adaption Layer 1 specification from the ITU. The 1.0 version was approved about 1995 and the 2.0 version was approved in January 1997.