Design, implementation and analysis of a multimedia conference system using TCP/UDP

It is generally accepted that most of the currently existing transport protocols such as TCP/UDP and OSI transport protocols are not suitable for multimedia conference applications, in which different media services require different service requirements. However, the wide use of these protocols make them attractive to people who are interested in finding the performance of these protocols and quickly bring multimedia to the desktop. The authors present the design, realization and analysis of a multimedia conference system on FDDI using TCP/IP protocols. End-to-end delays and jitters are measured to compare the performances of two architectures: one architecture is based on TCP in which all applications services, interactive video, interactive voice and data, are multiplexed at the application level and transmitted through TCP; the other architecture has interactive video and voice transmitted through UDP and data transmitted through TCP. The authors also present a new way to measure the delay which avoids the frequency synchronization problem. Important aspects of the experience gained from building the software for the multimedia conference are also presented, especially with respect to parallelism within different parts of the software.<>