• Multimedia systems have special networking requirements because, rather than just small volumes of data, large volumes of images are being transmitted. These transfers are executed over LANs & WANs .

• The increase use of e-mail and other web services has placed extensive demands on the networking infrastructure.

• The leading causes for network congestion are:

• Number of users accessing in the network.

• Business needs for more complex networks for a large variety of data transmissions including voice, data, and video messaging.

• Graphics-intensive applications

• Voice and video-based multimedia applications that require large volumes of data storage.

• The tasks can be broken down into the following types on the basis of the nature of the requirements for volume of data, potential sources of data and transfer speeds.

• Data transfer for text

• Data transfer for images

• Data transfer for audio and video clips

• Date transfer for text is the least demanding of the various transfer's types. A simpler and potentially lower cost, network services can provide adequate performance for text transfers.

• Data transfer for images is considerably more demanding due to high volume of data. A page of text may be as large as 2.5Kbytes. A black and white image of a page may, however range from 60Kbytes to 220 Kbytes even after compression.

• Data transfer for audio and video clip is much more intense than imaging. This is because of the third dimension, Time. A higher class of services is needed to provide acceptable performance.