Priority communication schemes on local area networks for multimedia traffic

We address the issues related to the delivery of multimedia streams on local area networks. Multimedia integrates voice and video along with text and images into existing systems. Traditionally, local area networks were designed to handle regular data traffic which are bursty in nature and for which variable delay is acceptable. Multimedia traffic, on the other hand, requires constant delay in addition to fast (or real time) delivery. Multimedia traffic also requires large bandwidth compared to regular traffic. Since local area networks are widely in use, their modification to integrate multimedia streams is very important. We propose priority-based communication schemes for the timely delivery of multimedia traffic on local area networks. We compare the performance of these schemes using simulation techniques.<>