A protocol architecture for multimedia document retrieval over high speed LANs

The emergence of gigabit local area networks (G-LANs) has spurred a tremendous interest in supporting networked multimedia applications over a LAN. Such LANs do not support the notion of QoS required by multimedia documents due to their asynchronous media access protocol. In this paper, we propose a dynamic bandwidth management scheme that uses the concept of time division multiple access (TDMA). A significant performance improvement is observed through experimental results, especially to transmission rates and jitter. We also propose a framework for graceful degradation of the playout quality of multimedia objects in cases where the LAN's total capacity is not sufficient to meet the overall demand.