Multiple access protocols for multimedia ATM traffic

Multimedia application integrates a variety of media, namely, audio, video, images, graphics, text and data. The ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technique has been recommended by the CCITT as the transport vehicle for BISDN (Broadband Integrated Service Digital networks) which is designed to provide multimedia traffic services. In this work we study some of the ATM-compatible multiple access MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) protocols, including DQDB (Distributed Queue Dual Bus, also known as IEEE 802.6), CRMA (Cyclic Reservation Multiple Access), DQMA (Distributed Queue Multiple Access), and FDQ (Fair Distributed Queue), and their performance for different kinds of multimedia application, including interactive education, on-line medical information system, and video conferences. We found that all four protocols achieve maximum throughput even at extremely high data rate, which make them suitable for carrying multimedia traffic in high speed networks.