|
Broadband miltimedia applications are becoming the main stream
of current and future networking services. To make these
services significant, a high-performance networking facility
should be provided and the Quality of Service (QoS) should be
guaranteed. While the introduction of ATM networks attempts to
meet these requirements at lower layers of network protocol
stacks, we tackle the same problem from a transport-layer
perspective. Conventional transport protocols like TCP and ISO
TP4 have revealed to be incapable of satisfying the
requirements for broadband multimedia applications in that they
were designed only for low-speed and high error-rate networking
environment. New approaches, such as VMTP and NETBLT, have thus
been proposed to confront the newly developed high-speed low
error-rate network setting, particularly using the rate-based
flow control mechanism . In truth, these new approaches lack
not only for the selection of the initial rates in the
implementation of the rate-based flow mechanism but also a
resource management scheme owing to intensive rivalry of
limited resources among high-throughput applications. This
thesis hence proposes a Broadband Multimedia Applications
Transport System (BMATS), aimed at the provision of a prototype
of a high-performance transport system using a resource
management scheme as well as a feasible rate-based flow control
protocol. Essentially, applications are categorized as three
classes for which various rates and resources are allocated .
The BMATS prototype has been conducted on two underlying
network platforms: stram-mode Network Interface Tap (NIT) and
socket-mode User Datafram Protocol (UDP). Owing to the poor
implementation of NIT, as will be shown, BMATS operates under
the UDP environment. The thesis demonstrates the performance
superiority of BMATS to TCP in terms of mean delay and
throughput of types 2 and 3 applications. However, the price
paid is the explicit blocking of types 2 and 3 applications.
|