| The increasing power of computer processors, coupled with the high bandwidths of new network technology, has fostered the ability of general purpose workstations to process larger amounts of multimedia. Unfortunately, workstation operating systems are not designed to support continuous media processing in real time. Current network processing subsystems in operating systems do not assure temporally reliable handling of packets for multimedia data, especially in the presence of other, conflicting streams of non-real time traffic.;This thesis addresses the problem of network subsystem support for distributed multimedia applications in operating systems. The research demonstrates a high performance network subsystem that provides quality of service guarantees to real time data in the presence of non-real time data streams. The network subsystem supports versions of IP, UDP and TCP, showing that multimedia support is possible within the standard Internet protocol suite.;An implementation in the network subsystem of the uChoices object-oriented operating system, as well as an implementation within the x-Sim protocol simulator, shows that a properly designed networking architecture effectively supports time-sensitive real time video and audio. |
