Isochronous services in home multimedia networks

The paper discusses the isochronous services provided in Whitecap/sup TM/ networks. The Whitecap is based on a micro-cell (subnet) architecture. The Whitecap architecture is designed to efficiently communicate multimedia data from one device to another. In Whitecap networks, each subnet consists of a master device and several client devices. Whitecap inherently supports heterogeneous client devices like the ones found in a home environment. The number of simultaneous clients serviced depends on the available bandwidth and the bandwidth requirement of the client device. Some of the common data types requiring isochronous services are voice, audio and video. Whitecap architecture guarantees these data types the required bandwidth and throughput services through Quality of service (Qos) negotiations. Some of the supported features are dynamic bandwidth negotiations, guaranteed bandwidth, guaranteed limit on latencies, different levels of error protection and retransmission rate. Negotiations can occur any number of times throughout the period of the connection. For best performance, audio and video compressions are optionally provided within the layers of this architecture.