People: Xiuping Lu and Prof. Jim Modestino's CIPR group

Industry Collaborators: HP.

Former People: Seung Kim (MS), Khem Wanglee (BS).

We are developing a testbed for research in multimedia networking jointly with the Center for Image Processing Research (CIPR) . The testbed currently contains HP C-180 workstations, a HP file server, a HP media stream video storage system which will be adapted to output MPEG-2 traffic. The networking components include ATM, Fast Ethernet and wireless network components.

Testbed development includes experimentation with various internetworking options between the heterogeneous subnetworks (ATM, Fast Ethernet and Wireless). We plan to add PCs with Windows NT, and install proprietary router and end-system code in workstations using both UNIX (BSD, Linux and Solaris) and Windows OS plaforms. The research agenda in multimedia networking is:

a) Experiment with networked video applications to assess the effect of new compression algorithms, packet loss, network delay, available bandwidth, and use of premium service classes.

b) Development and deployment of experimental middleware including protocols such as:

ATM Cells In Frames (CIF)
Internet integrated service classes
Resource Reservation Setup Protocol (RSVP) and
QoS-aware multimedia transport protocols .

In conjunction with industry sponsors and standards bodies like IETF and ATM forum, We will also conduct research in defining mappings among middleware components, application programming interfaces (APIs) like:

Microsoft's Winsock 2 and
Link layer technologies .

The platforms we expect to carry out this implementation work include PCs with Linux and/or Windows NT, and workstations with SUN Solaris and HP Unix operating systems. This project has synergies with concurrently proceeding projects on ATM and Internet traffic management, and Internet pricing .At a later stage, we will study multimedia education concepts and tools over this testbed.