The support of optical network protocols for multimedia ATM traffic

Multimedia application integrates a variety of media, namely, audio, video, images, graphics, text, and data, each of which have different quality of service (QOS) requirements. In this paper we evaluate the support of reservation-based high speed protocols including DQDB (distributed queue dual bus), CRMA (cyclic-reservation multiple-access), DQMA (distributed-queue multiple-access), and FDQ (fair distributed queue), for various multimedia traffic including low and medium quality video, high quality MMPEG video, and data traffic. Through extensive experiments, we vary different traffic and protocol parameters including transmission rate, delay and loss constraint, data load and data burstiness, to determine the number of multimedia sessions supported by each of the four protocols. Delay constraints have moderate effect on some of the protocols, but loss constraints have very little effect on any protocol. Bursty data significantly degrade real-time traffic performance, but the negative effect is almost corrected when delay constraint is somewhat relaxed. These results show that the reservation-based protocols are suitable for integrating real-time multimedia traffic with bursty data traffic in very high speed network, especially when delay constraint is somewhat relaxed. Due to its excellent fairness, FDQ clearly stands out to be the best protocol among four to support heterogeneous traffic.