Multimedia consumer applications on a heterogeneous network

The developing National Information Infrastructure (NII) will include a wide variety of end-user terminals, applications, and underlying transport technologies. The interoperability challenges raised by this diversity require simplifying models and interfaces to enable wide user access and to facilitate simple upgradeability. The Medley gateway model proposed here helps efficiently use the resources of heterogeneous data links and simultaneously maintain an “open” network architecture. We outline plans that demonstrate use of this model in an ATM-based testbed connecting Philips Research Palo Alto, U.C. Berkeley, and Stanford University