ted at an altitude of approximately 8,000 miles above the earth. Placing satellites at this level allows for shorter transmission lengths, thereby increasing the strength of the signal and decreasing the transmission delay. This in turn means that the receiving equipment on earth can be smaller, more lightweight, and less expensive. The downside to these altitudes is the smaller footprints provided by MEO satellites as opposed to their GEO counterparts.Another relatively new category of satellite orbits is the Low Earth Orbit (LEO). There are three categories of LEO satellites: Little LEO, Big LEO, and Mega LEO. LEO satellites typically orbit at a distance of only 500 to 1000 miles above the earth. As with the MEO satellites described above, LEO satellites further reduce the transmission delay and equipment expense, maintain a strong signal strength, and project a smaller footprint.ATM NETWORKSA network topology that has gained considerable popularity in the recent past is Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). This network switching technology, also known as Cell Switching, has been embraced by various factions of the network transmission community such as telephone companies, scientific research firms, and the military. ATM was designed to operate on transmission media at speeds of 155Mbps or more, giving it the advantage of good performance. ATM topology is connection-oriented offering a high Quality Of Service (QOS) level. The ATM network technology was originally envisioned as a way to create large public networks for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Additionally, ATM has been subsequently embraced by the LAN community to compete with Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.In its simplest form, ATM networks are switched networks that create a connection and path from a sender to one or more receivers for the transmission of fixed size frames known as cells. Cell transport is accomplished using a statistical multiplexing ...
