Multimedia Networking Handbook 1999 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0849399491 ISBN 13: 9780849399497

Publisher: Auerbach Publications, 1999

Synopsis

Multimedia technology represents the biggest technological breakthrough since the computer. As an IT professional, you must prepare your organizations' network infrastructure for all the "real-time" multimedia applications to come.

Multimedia Networking Handbook will teach you how to bring all the benefits of multimedia to your company. Prepare your IT infrastructure for audio, graphics, animation, full-motion video-all types of real-time multimedia applications. This one, irreplaceable handbook gives you easy to understand material on issues such as latency and bandwidth, critical technologies and standards such as FDDI, ATM, frame relay, SONET, B-ISDN and wireless technologies, as well as practical information from top experts at leading-edge companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens and MCI. You'll learn how to:

Reduce costs and add services with new band-width saving techniques

Expand your network's capacity, leverage your infrastructure and safeguard your network's privacy

Prepare your network for the stringent requirements for two-way interactive video

Lower WAN costs, enhance access capability and make faster upgrades with frame relay

Find out key networking options for supporting bursty data on LAN and WAN

Get a quick overview of how digital speech works

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Multimedia networking has begun to truly come of age in the modern business world. Although traditional "pure" networks still exist for the separate delivery of voice, data, and video, new networks are often implemented as a combination of all three types of remote communications merged into one delivery system. Indeed, many legacy networks are seeing the addition of multimedia applications as the greatest pressure to effective network throughput.

In the recent past, the innovations of multimedia communication have been brought to us primarily through encapsulation in data networks and multiplexed wide-area transport. Thus we have voice and video over IP data networks, voice over frame relay, and video through ISDN basic rate and primary rate services. Now, in addition to these methods, the cell-based switching of ATM offers a simple means to mix the high quality-of-service demands of voice and video with the more delay tolerant data services.

Image transmission, with its commensurate high bandwidth requirements, occupies an increasing portion of available network bandwidth, both on the local and global levels. Without considering the Internet for the moment, one can easily name a myriad of innovative applications that involve image transmission. For example, the image storage and the retrieval of photographs, scanned documents, medical images, maps, and even bank checks are common in today's network environment. Video conferencing over local and remote networks is in a very rapid phase of deployment, providing new opportunities in education, medicine, project collaboration, and management. The world benefits enormously from this new interactive video technology. Important applications encompass a range of uses from distance learning, to medical expert assistance for remote areas, to instant "distant" meetings.

The advent of the Internet adds several additional layers to the above uses for networked image transmission. Virtually all modern web sites contain rich graphic and image content, and many add simple animation and real-time audio. Real-time, ad-hoc, voice and video transmission are already feasible over the Internet. Point-to-point and point-to-multipoint transmission is easily accomplished for both audio and video, and multipoint conferences can be provided with little additional equipment. Broadcast, or so called "net-cast", media has begun to provide streaming information content for such applications as news, financial data, and weather with multimedia .

The addition of audio and video entertainment "channels" has begun in earnest on the Internet. At the present time, while sitting comfortably at your computer, you can tune in to your favorite jazz, classical, rock, easy listening, or alternative music from a variety of audio net-casters around the globe. Special purpose audio feeds are often available from live concerts. Video servers are now offering image transmission that includes periodic, still images as well as an increasing number of full-motion (more or less) video feeds that may be broadcast to thousands. One can easily "see" live images of the current ski conditions in Vail, the beach in Malibu, and the traffic conditions in Phoenix. Similar images are available from Sweden to Sydney. Even music concerts may now have a low-bandwidth video feed to the Internet.

These audio and video transmissions require substantial amounts of network bandwidth and have specific transmission-delay parameters to achieve reasonable quality. This bandwidth requirement stresses virtually every component in the super-network that is comprised of a chain of image servers, routers, switches, backbones, local networks, and premise connections. Bandwidth allocation, quality-of-service, compression techniques, transport technologies, and network management are all critically important considerations in the implementation of successful multimedia networking. Delivery of the multimedia content to the customer premise is another bandwidth-constrained system component that must be properly provisioned to support quality multimedia communication.

The Multimedia Networking Handbook, 1999 Edition, addresses all these issues that must be faced to implement satisfactory multimedia installations. It provides overview, insight, and details by subject-matter experts on each of the crucial aspects of multimedia networking. The book is organized into eight sections that each cover an important portion of multimedia networking issues. The reader is free to proceed in a straightforward manner through the individual chapters or to browse a particular topic in depth. Many of the chapters provide important reference information that will be consulted often.

About this edition

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0849399491
• ISBN 13: 9780849399497
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: James Trulove