Hey all,
Ever since I came across Lawrence Baldwin's site, I've been trying to work out what the optimal max MTU for a ADSL connection with PPPoA. His site discusses PPPoE but he mentions and I think he's right he's made a few mistakes and he's given up on it.
Anyway, I've been looking into it and best as I can make out, for VC-mux the optimal highest MTU commonly supported would be 1480. AAL5 with VC-mux has a 8 byte SAR trailer at the end of the last cell and is padded if necessary. With a 1480 byte MTU, 30 of the cells with have a full 48 bytes of data, the last cell will have 40 bytes of data and the 8 byte trailer.
With SNAP/LLC, the optimal MTU should be 1472 since it adds a 8 byte header.
I think all this is correct assuming I'm right that a 1480 byte IP transmission unit means 1480 bytes through the ATM link. I'm still not clear if there is any other overhead I'm missing. Lawrence's site suggests there is ethernet overhead but I think he's wrong??? If there is a 38 byte ethernet overhead that is sent through the ADSL ATM link, then the optimal max MTU would be 1490 I think (for VC-mux)?
For PPPoE, there is another 8 bytes of overhead to consider of course...
P.S. This is only relevant if you want to get the maximum out of your modem's ADSL link. If, for example, your ISP does not give the maximum from your link but does traffic shaping later on, it doesn't really matter, in fact a max MTU of 1500 is optimal since this minimises TCP/UDP overhead.