A Distributed Multimedia File Transfer System

The emerging technologies in high speed Gbit/sec networks (such as HIPPI,ATM, and SONET) have made possible the transfer of multimedia information (including video, image, voice, graphics, text and numerical data) for geographically dispersed users. However, conventional file transfer systems (which convert or prepare application users' multimedia information into streams of bitsto be transferred to physical networks, or vice versa) such as TCP/IP are far from sufficient in supporting the multimedia applications, and tend to become major performance bottlenecks for distributed multimedia applications. In the proposed Phase I work, a multimedia file transfer system will be developed for heterogeneous distributed networking enviornments, which automatically characterizes the service requirements for multimedia applications and extracts the needed engineering parameters (such as jitter, throughput, error rate, delay, etc.) to optimally drive or control the lower level physical networks. Moreover, the proposed system, which is independent of the underlying network architecture, will optimally plan and control the communications by taking into account the effect of underlying network architectures and traffic conditions.