Virtual seminar room-modelling and experimentation in horizontal and vertical integration

The initial design considerations and research goals for an ATM network based virtual seminar room with five sites are presented. The basic observation behind the design of the virtual seminar room is, that besides the constant growth in available bandwidth for transmission in communication networks, many networks either already offer or are developing technologies to give quality of service (QoS) guarantees. This means that applications not only will support transmission of coded audio and video, but can be designed in a known and well-controlled network environment, which enables the applications to provide, in a broad sense, a high and reliable quality presented at the human computer interface.