A novel approach to real time multimedia forwarding over heterogeneous networks

The Internet today is a heterogeneous network, and its bi-directional connectivity property is impaired by various network agents, such as Network Address Translators (NAT) and HTTP proxy servers. With the rapid growth of the Internet, users are increasingly seeking real-time video communication services which mostly require bi-directional connections. To meet this requirement, we propose a novel approach for transmitting real-time multimedia data over heterogeneous networks. The key idea is to design a multimedia gateway to forward audio/video streams between clients in different types of networks. This paper describes the methods for bi-directional communications between various network hosts, and introduces a multimedia gateway prototype. Experiments show that real-time video communication can work well with the proposed gateway in heterogeneous environments. The proposed approach is very suitable for corporate intranet users and Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) users.