Multimedia on the Internet

Over the past ten years, the Internet has evolved from its initial design to a network claimed to be capable of supporting virtually any application. This includes the transport of speech, audio and video flows, the broadcasting of radio or TV programs, that is, more generally, multimedia applications. However, these applications place new, challenging and often stringent requirements on the underlying infrastructure. Not only the applications must adapt themselves to the fact that the Internet is the vehicle for transporting their data, but also the network itself must be able to apply differentiated treatment to multimedia applications, either to secure an acceptable level of service, or on the contrary to protect the other applications from possible abuses of the multimedia activity. The talk will present a taxonomy of multimedia applications on the Internet, including IP telephony, videophony, videoconferencing, or broadcasting, and the requirements they place on the network. It will describe some of the key enabling technologies, such as RTP and will address the central question of quality of service.