A network environment for studying multimedia network architecture and control

In Bellcore's Integrated Media Architecture Laboratory (IMAL) architecture, control, and network design issues (including performance and its implications, traffic engineering, resource sizing, operations, and network architectures) of network-based multimedia services that are likely to exist in future broadband networks (e.g. broadband integrated services digital network) are studied. The authors present an overview of multimedia services that use audio, video, graphics, text, and other sorts of data; describe the laboratory environment used to support these services; and provide a high-level description of how these services have been implemented as networked modules. It is noted that, not only must these applications to able to exist on the same network, but they should be able to coordinate their functions and share information in the most natural format. The development of generic server models for all of these services and efforts to make their use intuitive are discussed