The existing local area networks (LANs) are not designed to support multimedia communication. The time-constraint requirements of continuous media, such as video, are not guaranteed by these LANs effectively. This thesis describes a timed token-passing medium access control protocol, called MASCOT, and the channel managemnet schemes to support multimedia communication in LAN. MASCOT supports both continuous media and non-continuous media communication in LANs using synchronous and asynchronous channels, respectively. The bandwidth allocation capacity of MASCOT for synchronous channels, like the timed token-passing protocol proposed by Shin and Zheng (called TTP-SZ protocol) [22], is roughly doubled that of FDDI protocol, because the worst-case token rotation time is bounded by TTRT, ins...[ Read more ]

The existing local area networks (LANs) are not designed to support multimedia communication. The time-constraint requirements of continuous media, such as video, are not guaranteed by these LANs effectively. This thesis describes a timed token-passing medium access control protocol, called MASCOT, and the channel managemnet schemes to support multimedia communication in LAN. MASCOT supports both continuous media and non-continuous media communication in LANs using synchronous and asynchronous channels, respectively. The bandwidth allocation capacity of MASCOT for synchronous channels, like the timed token-passing protocol proposed by Shin and Zheng (called TTP-SZ protocol) [22], is roughly doubled that of FDDI protocol, because the worst-case token rotation time is bounded by TTRT, instead of 2*TTRT of FDDI protocol, where TTRT is the target token rotation time of the network. The asynchronous throughput of MASCOT is optimal in the sense that higher asynchronous throughput provided by any protocol will not guarantee the worst-case token rotation time, while the asynchronous throughput of TTP-SZ is not optimal.

Based on the MASCOT protocol, a synchronous bandwidth allocation (SBA) scheme is devised for admission control and synchronous bandwidth allocation of the stations in a LAN according to their qualities of services (QOS) specifications. The SBA scheme is modified from that proposed by Shin and Zheng for FDDI network [25], and it guarantees the delay bounds and allocates the network bandwidth effectively.

To support multiple synchronous and asynchronous channels in a station, the MASCOT protocol is extended by a channel scheduling scheme which multiplexes the synchronous channels in a station to the MASCOT layer. It is achieved by passing the token conceptually among all synchronous channels of all stations. The scheme also multiplexes the asynchronous channels according to priority. The SBA scheme for single synchronous channel per station is then generalized to do admission control and bandwidth allocation of multiple synchronous channels. A monitoring and policing scheme is devised to regulate the traffic of the synchronous channels such that their delay bounds and throughputs are guaranteed, even if the media sources generate messages violating their specified QOS requirements.

The channel management architecture (CMA) is designed to integrate all the above schemes to support an application programming interface (API) layer for channel management, bandwidth allocation, QOS guaranteeing and buffer allocation. A channel management protocol is developed for peer-to-peer communication among CMAs of the stations in the network. A channel management scheme is formulated to support the channel management API calls. Finally, a set of standard channel types are defined for common media sources. They facilitate application programming.