Instead of using software, dedicated hardware devices known as ATM switches establish point-to-point connections between endpoints, and data flows directly from source to destination (Mitchell, 2021) .
ATM uses fixed-sized cells to encode data
ATM cells are 53 bytes in length, which consists of 48 bytes of data and five bytes of header information.
Each cell is processed at its own time. When one is finished, the procedure calls for the next cell to process. This is why it's called asynchronous; none of the cells go off at the same time relative to the other cells.