A network manager on Ethernets for distributed multimedia systems

Distributed multimedia systems require good quality of service for real-time data transmission. Ethernets, which use a non-deterministic protocol, cannot guarantee the requested bandwidth and there is a large variance in the data rate. A novel approach to supporting multimedia applications over Ethernets, where constant data rates and bandwidth requirements are guaranteed, is proposed. Unlike known solutions, the authors' approach does not require any changes either to the existing software or the Ethernet hardware.