Protocols for real-time multimedia data transmission over the Internet

The explosive growth of the Internet and the intranets have attracted a great deal of attention to the implementation and performance of networked multimedia services, which involve the transport of real-time multimedia data streams over non-guaranteed quality of service (QoS) networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP). In this paper, the author presents an overview of the existing architectural elements supporting real-time data transmission over the Internet. Effective implementations of such systems require a thorough understanding of both the network protocols and the coding systems used for compressing the signals to be transmitted in real-time. The paper includes a section discussing the issues to be considered in designing signal compression applications suitable for network use.