Supporting multimedia services over a token-passing bus local area network

Abstract EN

Besides data transactions such as web surfing and e-commerce, the Internet today has been experiencing growth in audio and video streaming with the emergence of multimedia tools.

However, the existing network infrastructure (e.g., Ethernet) only offers a single besteffort class of service without any guarantees on delay variation, packet losses or available bandwidth.

This can adversely impact the end-to-end performance of multimedia applications.

Accordingly, a different class of Media Access Control (MAC) protocols must be used to support multimedia services over the existing Local Area Networks (LANs) without seeking to change it [3].

The token-passing bus was introduced to avoid the non-determinism of Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) bus protocol as well as the complexities of active repeaters in the token ring [8].

This makes, token-passing bus MAC protocol is the best candidate to support multimedia traffic over Ethernet LANs [8].

In this paper, the capability of the token-passing bus LAN to provide multimedia services is explored and its performance under different multimedia traffic loads is evaluated using a simulation program.