Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a cell-oriented switching and multiplexing technology that uses fixed-length packets to efficiently carry different types of traffic, helping support multimedia applications and high-speed connections. ATM provides high performance through hardware switching, dynamic bandwidth allocation, quality of service support for multimedia, scalability, and common network architectures. It defines cell formats, address formats, and service classes like constant bit rate, variable bit rate, and available bit rate. Standards help provide stable frameworks and interworking between ATM and other networks. ATM supports applications including video, voice, and traffic management to optimize resource usage and deliver quality of service.