Ensuring quality of service for multimedia applications in a LAN environment

Abstract

We present a mechanism for dynamically allocating network resources in asynchronous LANs for supporting multimedia applications that require quality of service guarantee. The approach is based on the concept of time division multiple access (TDMA). It uses a centralized controller as the bandwidth manager. The total bandwidth is partitioned into two segments: one is used for serving multimedia connections and the other for the normal CSMA/CD sessions. Experimental results reveal that the performance of the proposed scheme is substantially better than that of the random access mechanism. In particular, transmission rates for multimedia hosts are improved significantly with low jitter variations in media streams.