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Development of a Multimedia Networking Course for Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology Program

1. Introduction

There is an explosive growth of multimedia data transmitted over the Internet recently. Multimedia data includes image, audio and video. Video-on-demand (VoD), videoconferencing, voice-over-IP (VoIP), Internet television (IPTV), video surveillance systems are some of the popular multimedia networking applications. For example, Netflix’s [5] Watch Instantly is a video-on-demand service now available for its subscribers. People can watch the movies online instantly at home over the high-speed Internet connections using this service. YouTube [6] is a video sharing web site, where people can upload, browse and share the videos. Millions of people are now using Skype [4] to make phones calls and have video conferencing over the Internet. People can watch TV programs broadcasted over the Internet using a computer, for example, PPLive [8] is one of the successful deployments of IPTV over the Internet. Besides the traditional client/server architecture, peer-to-peer networking architecture becomes very popular in the Internet because of its scalability and efficient utilization of network bandwidth. BitTorrent [1], Skype and PPLive are popular applications built over peer-to-peer networking technology. With the fast advances of wireless network and mobile devices, people can use the cellular phone, PDA to access Internet, check email, and even watch video clips using 3G cellular networks or Wi-Fi.

Multimedia networking application is different from the traditional FTP file downloading. In a multimedia networking application, which is also called streaming media, the media is being played while being downloaded. On the contrary, in traditional FTP applications, the media starts playback after it is downloaded to the local computer. Multimedia networking application has its own Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as bandwidth, packet loss rate, delay and jitter. The transmission of the audio and video has a minimum requirement on the network bandwidth in order to provide a continuous playback. Streaming media is highly sensitive to end-to-end delay and delay jitter, but can tolerate a certain degree of packet loss. Most of the nonreal-time Internet applications, such as Web browsing, FTP, and email, prefer a high throughput and can not tolerate packet loss. The current Internet is known as a best effort network. IP protocol at the network layer delivers the packet as fast as it can, but can not guarantee the quality of service needed for the multimedia applications. The lack of QoS support and the heterogeneity of Internet make the transport of multimedia over the Internet a challenging task. How to provide QoS for multimedia transmission in current best-effort Internet has been an active research area in both academic and industry.

Consider the popularity and challenges of multimedia networking applications, it is of great importance to introduce multimedia networking course to enhance the curriculum. The Computer Engineering Technology program in our university has a strong curriculum in networking. A variety of courses on networking are offered in the department, which includes Data Communication and Networking, Local Area Network and Management, Wide Area Network Design, Wireless Networking, Mobile Computing, Sensor Network, and Network Security. However, multimedia networking has not been covered in the courses. In addition, a Master of

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Luo, H. (2009, June), The Development Of A Multimedia Networking Course For An Electrical And Computer Engineering Technology Program Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5567