PROTOCOL ARCHITECTURE FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS OVER ATM NETWORKS

At the data-link layer, ATM offers a number of features, such as high- bandwidth and per-session quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, making it particularly attractive to multimedia applications. Unfortunately, many of these features are not visible to applications because of the inadequacies of existing higher-level protocol architectures, Although there is considerable effort underway to tune these protocols for ATM networks, we believe that a new ATM-specific protocol stack is essent ial to effectively exploit all the benefits of ATM. In this paper, we describe the semantics of such a protocol stack, and discuss its advan tages over traditional protocol architectures from the perspective of multimedia applications, The performance impact of the new protocol ar chitecture is experimentally demonstrated on a video conferencing test bed built around IBM RS/6000's equipped with prototype hardware for vi deo/audio processing, and connected via ATM links.