Multimedia on the Internet

Abstract

Summary form only given. Sun is a strong supporter of open standards and therefore believes in cross-platform interoperability. The web is the universal interface to world's digital library. The biggest component of multimedia is video. Compliance of video with international standards based on ISO/MPEG specifications is very important in terms of facilitating interoperability. The standardized universal interface provides broadcast capability: publish once, reach millions. For worldwide interoperability of video communication, it is essential that there is a strict adherence to the profile architecture that has been developed by the MPEG Requirements Committee. Today's multimedia applications require reliable, on time delivery of data to one or more hosts simultaneously. In order to provide this capability, multicasting and quality of service guarantees must be incorporated into the network infrastructure. RSVP (reservation setup protocol) is a network control protocol that allows Internet applications to obtain special quality-of-service (QoS) for their dataflows. This will generally (but not necessarily) require reserving resources along the datapaths and providing some mechanism for packet scheduling in the routers. RSVP is a component of the future "integrated services" Internet, which will provide both best effort and real-time qualities of service. When an application in a host (end system) requests a specific QoS for its datastream, RSVP is used to deliver the request to each router along the path(s) of the datastream and to maintain router and host state to provide the requested service.