QoS-driven networked continuous media server

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Continuous Media (CM) system including a CM server and CM clients. It has been proven that TCP/IP is not suitable for distributed applications that require high network bandwidth and timing-criticality. UDP/IP is one of the alternatives. However, due to the fact that UDP is a lossy protocol, there will be many issues that arise when implementing distributed CM applications, some of which will be discussed in this report. Moreover, the magic word QoS (Quality of Service) causes other difficulties. Most of the QoS metrics known so far assume that the communication channel is lossless. In this paper, since we use UDP for CM data transmission, we adopt a new QoS metric that is applicable to lossy streams to evaluate the performance of our server.