A lightweight transport protocol for multi-resolution and real-time multimedia communications over heterogenous networks

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.The objective of the thesis was to develop a lightweight transport protocol for real-time, multi-party, multimedia communications over heterogeneous networks. Due to the heterogeneity of desktop computing power, I/O bandwidth, and networking capacities, a lightweight transport protocol (LWTP) is necessary to deliver multiresolution audio and video onto the desktop. A LWTP-level gateway was also designed to make use of this embedded information to optimize real-time audio and video data transmission so that real-time multimedia communications will be possible over heterogeneous networks with various latencies, bandwidths, and reliabilitys. In this thesis, we investigated the quality of service (LOS) requirements and optimizations for real-time, multi-party, multimedia communications. We implemented an experimental videoconferencing system which demonstrated the inadequacies of the existing local area networks (LANS) and the Internet wide area networks (WANs). Based on the empirical results of these experiments, algorithms were designed to optimize the use of the networking resources for real-time audio and video communication. An infrastructure of the multi-resolution videoconferencing was described. A LWTP based on the Internet RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) draft was develop ed as a transport protocol for delivering multi-resolution audio and video over heterogeneous networks through a LWTP-level gateway