Multimedia Networking Technologies, Protocols, and Architectures

This practical resource provides a survey on the technologies, protocols, and architectures that are widely used in practice to implement networked multimedia services. The book presents the background and basic concepts behind multimedia networking, and provides a detailed analysis of how multimedia services work, reviewing the diverse network protocols that are of common use to implement them. To guide the explanation of concepts, the book focuses on a representative set of networked multimedia services with proven success and high penetration in the telecommunication market, namely Internet telephony, Video-on-Demand (VoD), and live IP television (IPTV). Contents are presented following a stepwise approach, describing each network protocol in the context of a networked multimedia service and making appropriate references to the protocol as needed in the description of other multimedia services. This book also contains questions and exercises to provide the reader with insight on the practical application of the explained concepts. Additionally, a laboratory practice is included, based on open-source tools and software, to analyze the operation of an Internet telephony service from a practical perspective, as well as to deploy some of its fundamental components.