15. Network Services and Protocols for Multimedia Communications

Computer communication networks are essential to the modern computing environment we know and have come to rely upon. Multimedia communications and networking share all the major issues and technologies of computer communication networks. Indeed, the evolution of the Internet, particularly in the past two decades, has been largely driven by the ever-growing demands from numerous conventional and new generation multimedia applications. As such, multimedia communications and networking have become a very active area for research and industrial development. This chapter will start with a review of the common terminologies and techniques in modern computer communication networks, specifically the Internet, followed by an introduction to various network services and protocols for multimedia communications and content sharing, since they are becoming a central part of most contemporary multimedia systems. We also use Internet telephony as an example to illustrate the design and implementation of a typical interactive multimedia communication application.