Multimedia integration of variable bit rate sources over the FDDI network.

Abstract

Multimedia is the future of today's communication field. Multimedia communications involve the transmission of different sources, such as video, voice, data and graphics, on the same network. This thesis focuses on the performance study of the Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) network when multimedia sources are integrated. In the first part of the study, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) video and data traffic are studied on FDDI. The second part of the study is the integration of VBR video and voice sources. In order to improve the multiplexing gain, the bit dropping algorithm is used on voice sources. It is shown that due to the dynamic bandwidth transfer property of FDDI, multimedia sources can be integrated without affecting the quality of service required by various media. Performance measures such as delay, variance and efficiency are calculated for each component of multimedia. Also using the bit dropping algorithm on voice sources, the delay and the probability of loss of voice packets decreases while the quality of voice is much higher than required.