Distributed Multimedia: How Can the Necessary Data Rates be Supported?

At the Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University 1, we have been developing a system in which it is possible to deliver data to a presentation machine from a remote machine across a public network at a sustained high rate. We have called this system a Continuous Time Media System (CTMS). We have found that the UNIX 2 model used for transfer of data between two devices, the network transport protocols, and the ability of adapters to transfer data between themselves are insufficient to do this. We have made modifications to each of these system in order to create a prototype system that we can measure to help define a CTMS protocol. We present the results of this work in this paper.