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 first part of the book presents the background and basic concepts behind multimedia networking, and provides an introductory high-level overview of the different services and protocols that will be covered in the book. Each of the subsequent parts of the book is focused on the practical analysis of a specific multimedia service, reviewing the diverse network protocols that are of common use to implement it. In particular, 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 IPTV.This book also contains exercises based on open source tools and software, analyzing the practical operation of diverse multimedia services as well as implementing and deploying some of its fundamental components. This understand the detailed operation of individual multimedia networking protocols, as they are described in depth from a technical perspective; second, it will provide a contrasted reference to current solutions and best practices to implement and deploy networked multimedia services. Contents are presented to the reader 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 subsequent parts of the book.