Supporting very high bandwidth services: a possible network structure

A discussion is given on some work in progress which has led to the production of a demonstration high speed ATM-like network able to support multimedia services. The network is based on an early version of the Orwell protocol and operates at a physical layer speed of 155.5 MBits/S. A real time video connection running at 77.5 MBits/S is supported. This provides essentially standard TV quality images, with no loss of quality between scene changes. This is intended mainly as a demonstration of the potential to provide high guaranteed bandwidth to future multimedia users. The authors concentrate upon those aspects of the network which are necessary for multimedia support; namely the ability to supply agreed bandwidth on demand and with controlled end-to-end delay