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1999
Doctoral Thesis
Titel
Multipoint data-communication with active network elements in heterogeneous communication environments
Titel Supplements
Motivation, specification, implementation and evaluation of an active communication infrastructure for streaming services
Abstract
Multipoint data-communications is among the hot topics of communication research and development. A lot of studies and ideas have been presented, the vast majority focusing on a homogenous environment in terms of physical network, communication protocol stacks, coding schemes and/or service qualities. First straight-forward implementations -Steve Deering's IP multipoint on the MBone being the most popular one- already give an idea of the capabilities of a multipoint environment. While the distribution of bits and bytes to multiple destinations is a solved problem, service provision is not. Especially in heterogeneous environments (applications, endsystems, networks) the capabilities and service quality provided to end-users do often not meet customer requirements. This issue becomes more and more problematic with the Internets move from a research network to a commercially exploited communication medium. This thesis focuses on the case of multipoint communication in a heterogeneous real-time environment. It investigates the multipoint requirements of multimedia teleservices and proposes an active network architecture to provide some of the required services to potential applications. The first chapter introduces multipoint data-communication and presents various features of multipoint service. The current state of the art is presented in chapter two (concepts and algorithms) and chapter three (communication protocols). The fourth chapter presents application requirements to multipoint communication and matches them against existing solutions. The result is compiled in a table which visualizes the gaps in present systems and protocols. A new approach to provide added networking services to applications by active network elements is described in the fifth chapter. Chapter six of this thesis presents a new architecture for a multipoint communication service provision which fills missing gaps, supports interworking in a heterogeneous environment and provides various service classes to the enduser, thus meeting the requirements of multimedia teleservices. A service specification and a protocol specification are presented in chapter seven as a basis for an implementation. A prototype implementation is described in chapter eight, and first application experiences are presented (chapter nine). The results are used for an evaluation of the specified protocol and a discussion of the proposed architecture. Finally, conclusions are drawn for further work.
ThesisNote
Zugl.: Bonn, Univ., Diss., 1999