Providing support for real-time multimedia data transfer

This paper describes the architecture of a front end system able to transfer real-time multimedia data. The system behaves as an interface between different multimedia sources/sinks such as audio/video devices, and an ATM network. Three important points of our work are described: the hardware architecture that consists of a parallel processing platform and external devices interfaces; the operating system that uses scheduling policy which exploits the characteristics of multimedia data and offers different classes of processes; the transport protocol mechanisms that provide support for real time multimedia data transfer