ABSTRACT
Traditional broadcasting of data assumes that there is a path from the source to the destination and that there is no need to establish or provision bandwidth, links, or buffers. Hence, whatever is received at the destination is subject to the limitations of the path separating the transmitter and the receiver. This simple model, which has worked for telecommunication engineers over many years, fails miserably when the data to be transported is digital and in packet form. It fails at various points along the route to the destination because routers and links may have varying bandwidths and speeds and, because they were not originally configured for any particular set of multimedia rate, their efficiencies are limited. In some cases, they work perfectly because they meet the requirements of the communication and in others they fail because the requirements for resources are higher. In traditional Internet, the resources between the source and destinations include buffers, links, and CPU speeds.
