A New Global Network Approach for Multimedia Communication

We believe that designing a new network protocol stack whether for conventional communications or for perceptual time multimedia applications should be based on new concepts that suit the specific goals. Our aim is to build a platform for multimedia applications. It has hence to consider suitable concepts that will hopefully lead to an optimal design. The Multimedia platform (PRISM) design had to take in consideration three different principals: The protocol stack, the network interface and the operating system. This paper focuses on the first two items and shows the current implementation approach. In the protocol stack, we describe two main concepts, inherent to the platform which are: 1) Ptp, a point to point protocol that does not integrate the usual complete network layer. 2) Routing at the application layer. At network interface level, we describe the ATM Memory Interface that offers an efficient method for exchanging data through memory and without hence the conventional bus crossing that penalizes the basic available bandwidth.