Evaluation of 10Base-T and 100Base-T Ethernets carrying video, audio and data traffic

Multimedia applications integrate a variety of media, namely, audio, video, images, graphics, text, and data. These media have different bandwidth, delay, and loss requirements. Data traffic is predominantly bursty and it requires reliable service from the network, but it can tolerate delay. In contrast, audio and video traffic is stream-oriented, it can tolerate some loss of data, but it requires delivery within a bounded delay. To support multimedia communications, it is desirable to use existing network infrastructures, which are designed specifically for data applications. In such existing network infrastructures, Ethernet is the most popular LAN scheme used. The authors have simulated 10Base-T and 100Base-T Ethernet segments carrying constant bit rate audio/video streams and data traffic (bursty and non-bursty). Given the stream rate, stream delay and loss constraints, as well as the date load and burst size, they have determined the number of streams supportable.<
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