AbstractThis paper presents a distributed simulator for performance analysis of various applications in the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) environment. The simulator is used to determine how the quality of a service, either synchronous or asynchronous, is affected when it is transmitted through an ATM network under various traffic conditions. The simulator has been implemented in a distributed Unix environment using network and operating system functions and simulates the three lower layers of B-ISDN. It has been based on the time-driven approach, and is modular and expandable because it uses standard operating system calls for adapting new applications and services to the simulator environment. The paper presents performance analysis results of constant and variable bit rate services, as well as experimental results on compressed and uncompressed image transmissions.