Laboratory for emulation and study of integrated and coordinated media communication

摘要

In future telecommunications networks, understanding the issues of user-network control, Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) technologies, services and user applications is as important as the classical network problems of channel structure, switching, and transmission. This paper discusses a Bell Communications Research facility, the Integrated Media Architecture Laboratory (IMAL), designed to flexibly emulate a wide range of current and future network and CPE environments with a focus on multiple media communications. IMAL combines off-the-shelf technologies to create an easily clonable emulation environment for studying, planning, demonstrating, and checking the feasibility of integrated media communications.

rn

The IMAL project has assembled workstations which feature speech-synthesis/sampled-audio/telephony capabilities, local 1 MIP computation capacity, and a high-resolution color display integrating text/graphics/image/video under an expanded X Window display management system. (X Windows is an emerging windowing standard to provide high performance device-independent graphics.) The workstations may be augmented as needed by local image digitizers, video cameras, and color image printers producing paper and viewgraph hardcopies. Also, the workstations are interconnected with switches permitting access to one another as well as shared databases, temporary storage, intelligence, and information processing/conversion resources. Communications services are implemented under a distributed, real-time service primitive control scheme. This multiple-media service primitives scheme employs a threaded/dataflow-type architecture to support user-defined, network-defined, and vendor-defined services while including a wealth of flexible features for the study of network architecture, protocol, network management, and billing functions.