LAN emulation offers a best-effort, connectionless, packet transfer service at the MAC sublayer, implemented on top of a connection-oriented ATM network.

uch interest has been expressed in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, due to its flexibility and its support of multimedia traffic. Interest first came from the carriers and the manufacturersofwide areanetworkingequipment, andnow interest is growing in the application of ATM technology to the local and campus area networking environments. ATMoffersmuchgreatercapacitythan existing shared medium LANs. It is scalable in that the capacity of an ATh4 system is not fundamentally limited by the technology itself. Also, it is designed to support multimedia traffic and is capable of offering seamless integrationwithwide area ATM networks, both public and private. Much of the current discussion justifies the