Support for High-Performance Multipoint Multimedia Services

Abstract. Existing and upcoming distributed multimedia applications require highly diverse services to satisfy their communication needs. Service integrated communication systems should be capable of providing high-performance real-time multipoint communication service with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Existing communication systems and known strategies for resource reservation face increasing difficulties in fulfilling these requirements, in particular in high-speed wide area networks. Therefore, new concepts are required to support the variety of emerging applications in a heterogeneous internetworking environment. In this paper, a framework for real-time multipeer services is presented. It is based on the separation of service requirements into network bearer and transfer service requirements. The transfer service enhances the network bearer service in order to meet the service requirements of the applications. Applications and transport systems interact using an enhanced service interface, which offers several QoS parameters. The transfer service is supported by transfer components (layer 2b-4 protocol functions in end and intermediate systems), resource management functions and the integration of specialized VLSI modules for time-critical processing tasks. The hardware components can be parametrized and selected individually dependent on the require