Multimedia applications in heterogeneous Internet/ATM environments

Abstract

New application types such as distributed multimedia applications have to provide a certain quality of service (QoS) to the users. Since they handle time‐critical information such as audio and video data, they need appropriate support from the system components and especially from the network. New protocols and mechanisms have been developed over recent years to offer integrated services by serving both discrete media data (such as text and graphics) and continuous‐media data (i.e. audio and video) in digital networks. Internet and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) are the main players in this area and both possess QoS architectures which allow them to integrate services of data‐ and tele‐ communications formerly performed by separate infrastructures. We believe that both will co‐exist for a significant amount of time, potentially complemented by other, perhaps simpler, approaches which are currently under investigation, such as differentiated services. Therefore, an interaction between these two architectures is necessary. In this paper, we discuss interaction approaches for the QoS architectures developed for the Internet and for ATM. We base this description on requirements and scenarios of multimedia applications and on the possible communication patterns considering different topological variants for heterogeneous Internet‐ATM networks.