A flexible communication architecture to support multimedia services in high speed network

There have been research works on supporting QoS (Quality of Service) in a distributed multimedia systems. These researches can be categorized as following; system platform, real-time operating system, transport protocol, communication architecture. In distributed multimedia environment, QoS must be guaranteed in end systems, but much less progress has been made in addressing this problem. As the processing power of end systems increases, most of the bottleneck occurs in communication protocol, especially transport protocol. To meet an end-to-end QoS, overall QoS architectures must be integrated. In this paper, we propose a new QoS architecture and control mechanisms (group control, and flow control) to guarantee an end-to-end QoS for distributed multimedia services. We also verify proposed architecture by applying them to a multimedia conferencing system in LAN.