Packet communication protocol for image services on a high-speed multimedia LAN

The authors describe the requirements for high-speed multimedia communication and propose a high-speed communication protocol to provide congestion-free access and efficient retransmission/flow control. Its usefulness is proved in a 400 Mb/s multiaccess loop local area network (LAN) with a 100 Mb/s user interface. The main characteristics of the protocol are separation of image communication handling, guarantee of no buffer overflow in a network, and end-to-end block-based transfer. Buffer reservation control in the user-network interface and a retransmission scheme based on a long-size block are used to realize high-speed congestion control and error recovery. A multimedia terminal architecture suitable for real-time image communication is also discussed. In the prototype system, a few frames of high-resolution image information can be transferred in a second. Around 26 Mb/s effective throughput between application entities has been obtained