Broadband application transport service and management

Multimedia applications using broadband networking technologies (for example, Asynchronous Transfer Mode) often require services not provided by standard transport layer middleware, such as TCP or TP4. A broadband transport service must provide support for QoS (quality of service) control, multiparty control, synchronization, packet sequence reconstruction, and direct data-link access. Management of a broadband transport service also plays an important role. For example, management information can be used to control parallelism in cases of excessive session delay. This paper introduces the design and management of a transport middleware service suitable for broadband applications. We examine a case study that shows how management information is used to control the transport middleware service and assist in fault and accounting management.