Experiences with multimedia applications over native ATM

Abstract

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a high-speed networking technology that has gained wide acceptance for wide area and local area network environments. In the last few years, many applications have been deployed to run over ATM. However, most of these implementations use TCP or UDP as transport layers, with IP-over-ATM providing the network layer. Real desktop multimedia applications running over native ATM are yet to be deployed. In this paper, we present raw data performance results for TCP-UDP/IP and native ATM on Windows NT 4.0. We also describe our performance experiences with native ATM implementations of multimedia applications such as video conferencing and medical visualization. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of native ATM over TCP/IP on quality of service (QoS) parameters such as jitter, in cases when multiple multimedia applications run concurrently. It is hoped that the lessons and experiences gained will be useful to designers and implementers of native ATM services on popular operating system platforms such as Windows NT 4.0.1998 Academic Press