It is always confusing, and perhaps inconvenient at times, using generic terms that will mean something to everyone but different things to different people. "High Performance" is one of those terms. High Performance can be viewed as synonymous to High Speed or Low Latency or a number of other characteristics. The interesting thing is that such ambiguity can sometimes be useful in a world where focus shifts quite easily from one issue to another as times and needs evolve. Many things have changed since the first HPN conference held in Aachen, Germany in 1987. The focus then was mainly on Media Access Control (MAC) protocols that allow users to share the high bandwidth of optical fiber. FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) was making its debut with its amazing 100 Mbps speed. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and SONET (the Synchronous Optical Network) were beginning to capture our imagination. What could users possibly do with such "high performance"? Share it! After realizing that the real problems had gradually shifted away from the network media to the periphery of the network, focus also began to shift. Adapter design, protocol implementation, and communication systems architecture began to attract our interest. Networking -not Networks-became the hot issue.

Inhalt

One Multicast Implementation Issues.- 1 Multicast server architectures for supporting IP multicast over ATM.- 2 Center placement algorithms for large multicast groups.- Two Experimental Results.- 3 On the integration of the UMTS amd B-ISDN system.- 4 Measuring the behavior of a world-wide web server.- 5 A framework for ATM testing.- Three Multimedia Traffic.- 6 The effect of various ATM switch architectures on VBR video performance.- 7 Throughout optimization for multimedia applications over high speed networks.- 8 Issues in platform-independent support for multimedia desktop.- 9 Design and implementation of a flexible traffic controller for ATM connections.- Four Quality of Service.- 10 On routing with QoS constraints in ATM networks.- 11 Mobiware: QoS-aware middleware for mobile multimedia communications.- Five Fundamental Concepts.- 12 Enforcing quality of service for adaptive multimedia applications via fair queueing.- 13 Adaptive variation of reliability.- 14 On compartmental modelling of multi-service communication networks.- 15 Performance evaluations of partial order connections.- Six Architectural Issues.- 16 A performance model for integrated layer processing.- 17 An architecture for active networking.- 18 The strategy of traffic dispersion.- Seven Bandwidth Allocation.- 19 Dynamic bandwidth allocation for stored VBR video in ATM endsystems.- 20 Analysis of a new end-to-end proportional bandwidth allocation algorithm.- 21 A simulation study of a wireless bandwidth reservation multiple access protocol for multimedia traffic.- Index of contributors.- Keyword index.