This chapter describes the various standards and technologies used to implement local area networks or LANs.
LANs are becoming important because most computers now used in business applications are connected to a LAN and therefore, for many users, it is the delivery medium of choice for multimedia data. Unfortunately many LAN technologies, and Ethernet in particular, were developed for the transfer of simple data and not video and/or audio. As a result, there is an immediate problem of using an existing system which is not suited to the traffic it is now being asked to support.
The main problem areas are the increased volume of data that needs to be delivered for multimedia and the requirements for realtime and predictable data transfers. ...
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