Communications Architecture for Distributed Multimedia Systems

Abstract

The digital age is appearing at every corner. Moreover, it is searched by many and yarned by even more. Even if one has digital contents there are still different ways of transporting its bits, and producers want to employ whichever resources are more suitable to deliver their product with the best quality, in the most efficient and, above all, more economic way. This, of course, leads to a myriad of solutions, with different equipments and software products. This thesis will focus the discussion on the network aspects of these solutions, namely we will deal with the craving of TV studios for the digital means to turn their multi medium networks into a singular digital content driven one. TV studios have, as all other business, particular aspects. TV operators (broadcasters and producers) want to change their over-budget production studios into a more economic viable solution, but without relinquishing any of its quality standards. That means that they want to produce the same program material with the same output quality(ies) using less expensive hardware/software in a more integrated way. Putting it mildly, they need to do a total rewrite of their program production flow to fully enter the digital arena. Their network software/hardware will undoubtedly be one of the aspects to (r)evolve. This thesis will continue the work being done in the framework of some research projects to implement these functionalities. The effort so far has been to use IT technology in place of the high cost proprietary hardware/software normally used in TV studios. In this text, we will pursue this goal, but will restrain ourselves to network concerns. Namely, ATM technology will be our primary subject. We will introduce ATM to the TV studio network and try to see how good they blend together. Naturally, ATM will not be the sole network infrastructure to be used, which implies the development of a system to cope with different networks. In this aspect, the development made so far to integrate different network technologies will serve as a starting point to the discussion in this thesis.