How inefficient is IP over ATM anyway

The explosive interest in B-ISDN and its underlying asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has been making itself felt throughout the telecommunications industry. The impending introduction of long and short haul links based on ATM has led to its application to packet services such as the DARPA Internet Protocol (IP). Some earlier work on IP traffic between main IP routers (WAN traffic) has led to concerns over the efficiency of using small cells. The authors describe the results of IP traffic traces taken within a departmental LAN over a 16-day period. This traffic is used to drive a model of IP-over-ATM to analyze the real efficiency of the technique. >