A fragmentation scheme for multimedia traffic in active networks

Multimedia data are usually very large. Fragmentation of multimedia data units is inevitable when they are transmitted through networks. Active networks are becoming popular, and active technologies are being applied to various interesting problems. When applying active technologies to multimedia data, however, the problem of fragmenting large packets still exists. Furthermore, new issues emerge when active capsules are fragmented. In this paper, we propose a new fragmentation scheme which addresses the unique needs of active networks and which utilizes the special properties of active networks. We propose an algorithm to fragment the data at the transport layer, which can minimize the overhead. Preliminary experimental results show that the scheme works well under realistic scenarios, with an overhead of less than 5%