This book covers everything LAN and WAN professionals need to know to prepare for -- and deploy -- networked multimedia.Networked multimedia applications are poised for explosive growth. This book gives LAN and WAN managers detailed insights into the hardware, protocol and performance implications of these new applications. Learn how to evaluate and plan for higher bandwidth, quality of service and scalability requirements. Review the unique issues surrounding Internet MBone multicasting, push technology, videoconferencing, real-time streaming media, shared whiteboards and other networked multimedia. The book also includes detailed coverage of MPEG-2; delay and synchronization issues; real-time streaming protocols; and the implications of IPv6.For all communications engineers and WAN managers who must plan for and manage multimedia traffic on their networks.

Preface At the dawn of a new millennium, an information revolution is taking place that involves the convergence of communications with computers. The Internet is a first manifestation of that revolution. Soon to come are technologies that will integrate commerce, education, entertainment, and telecommunications. New consumer products are emerging that will combine the functions of the telephone, the personal computer, and television. Radically innovative telecommunications systems are being developed that will enable the free flow of multiple mediavoice, data, image, video informationbetween these new personal information terminals. These new telecommunications systems involve combinations of the switched public telephone network, broadcast and cable-TV (CATV) nets, as well as wide- and local area data networks. In this telecommunications-driven information revolution, the major technology enabler is multimedia. Who Should Read This Book The book is a professional reference for electrical engineers and computer scientists. It is also intended as a classroom resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in telecommunications and in computer science. What This Book Covers This book presents the basic technical concepts of multimedia technology and the communications principles underlying multimedia networking. It covers the systems aspects of computer communications, centering on the network protocols needed to make multimedia communications practicable. The coverage extends from the lowest (physical) layer protocols to the highest (application) layer. We also emphasize communications requirements for multimedia, with particular stress on what these requirements imply for the design of network protocols. In addition to coverage on protocols, we include a comprehensive chapter on the network technology underpinnings that pertain to multimedia communications, including the very important Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. Again, systems issues are emphasized, rather than the hardware and software bases of these technologies. Finally, we examine important applications of multimedia communication and address new systems approaches needed to render these communications as efficient and inexpensive as possible. Thus, the kinds of applications presented in this book involve both multimedia and communications. What This Book Does Not Cover Not covered here are applications involving the representation of multimedia information, such as multimedia authoring and the design of multimedia databases, because they do not necessarily involve communications aspects. Among other topics not presented in this volume are baseline computer networking principles, such as TCP/IP, routing, and local area networking. It is assumed that the reader has a basic background in computer networking and knows how to use the Internet and browse the World Wide Web. How the Book Came To Be The idea for this book resulted from a series of discussions in Mannheim, Germany between two of the editorsFranklin Kuo and Wolfgang Effelsberg. Kuo spent the academic year 1995-96 as a visiting professor at the University of Mannheim and was supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award. His host was Professor Effelsberg, chair of Praktische Informatik IV (Computer Science) at Uni Mannheim. Kuo was very impressed by the high degree of technological sophistication in multimedia communications that was exhibited not only at the Mannheim center but at other research institutes in Germany, including the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg (about 20 kilometers from Mannheim). Kuo and Effelsberg decided to edit a book on multimedia communications, focusing on the expertise and technical insights of European computer scientists working in the field. Since mult