Distributed multimedia applications impose stringent and complex requirements on the switching and transport architectures of a network. An analysis shows that both synchronous transfer mode (STM) and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) can meet the bandwidth and performance requirements of the emerging multimedia applications. ATM becomes the technology of choice, however, since it can:
Transfer multimedia traffic efficiently, via its channel sharing capability,
Employ statistical multiplexing using cell‐switching to obtain high channel utilization, and
Support connectivity eficiently in many‐to‐one, one‐to‐many, and many‐to‐many communications environments.
Two kinds of multimedia conferencing bridging systems have been examined: peer-to-peer and network-based bridging architecture. The investigation shows that the network-based system outperforms the peer-to-peer architecture in saving the bandwidth in the access link as well as within the network especially for audio and video. However, peer-to-peer bridging appears to be optimal for data.
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