AN OVERVIEW OF THE MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS EXCHANGE (MMCX) AND ITS PERFORMANCE CHARACTERIZATION

MultiMedia Communications eXchange (MNCX), a new offering from Lucent Technologies, supports mixed media calling between end points on a loc al area network (LAN) such as Windows-based personal computers and an y H.323 standards-compliant end point (for example, an Internet phone) . The MMCX client/server architecture also provides access to the wide area network (WAN), allowing LAN end points to call users on other ne tworks. The MMCX enables users to communicate and collaborate in a man ner that best suits their needs by supporting multiparty conferencing with any type and combination of mixed media. MMCX calls can consist o f any mix of voice, data, image, and video media types, with at least one of the calling/called parties directly connected to a packet trans mission and/or switched network. A party to the call may be using one or more communications media, but it is not necessary for all parties on a multiparty conference call to be using the same media mix. For ex ample, three parties may be communicating visually using LAN-connected desktop computers equipped with a videoconferencing option (audio and video), and a fourth party may be conferenced via a telephone, but he or she may only be able to speak and listen to the other parties on t he call. To provide high-quality real-time mixed media collaboration i n a LAN and LAN environment, important performance requirements for pa cket delays (such as call post-dialing delays) and media blocking must be met. This paper presents an overview of the MMCX and its performan ce analysis. A design tool based on our analysis has been developed to run in a PC/Windows-based environment that can be used interactively to design and reconfigure MMCX-based networks.