A video mail distribution system for networked personal computers

mance of X F S to insure that it provides the file access bandwidth required by our video mail application. The Computer Networks Laboratory at the University of Virginia has used the Xpress TranSferProtocol (XTP) to construct the Xpress File System (XFS), a local area network peer-to-peer file sharing system for MS-DOS based IBM Personal Computers. XFS is usable for a variety of purposes, most notably the real time delivery of multimedia data streams. Using specialized hardware and software from Fluent Machines Inc., we have shown that XFS is capable of maintaining syffrcient file system to fire system throughput to support the real time delivery of the 30 frames per second audwlvideo data stream generated by the Fluent system. This paper provides a general discusSection one of this paper provides the motivation for the XFS video mail system. Section two contains a general introduction to the hardware and software components of the Fluency multimedia system. Sections three and four discuss X F S and the MS-DOS device driver that is the core of XFS . In section five we describe the role of X T P as the communication promo1 embedded in XFS. Section six summarizes the performance of XFS, and section seven explores the requirements for a PC based teleconferencing system. sion of the architecture and operation of X F S , and an overview of the Fluent system that we use to generate and 2w Oveniew Of process motion video data streams. We also describe our plans to extend the video mail system into a video conferencing system using XTP.