SUMMARY

The use of Internet is rapidly increasing in business as well as home applications.
The Internet growth rate is roughly doubling in size each year. Deployment of streaming media is growing even faster,
twice as fast as the Internet itself. One can recognize not only a convergence of data, voice and broadcast networks on wired, wireless and satellite infrastructures which form a closed or an open network but also from computer, telephony and entertainment services. Moreover, the nature of data transported on the Internet will change from more or less static data (text, pictures or even some scripts) where timely delivery of information is less important or critical, to data which put heavy requirements on timely delivery, such as video and data streaming, multicasting and Voice over IP applications. Internet protocols are going to be used by a variety of players on the market.

A simple consumer oriented model could be described with the following players:

• Content providers (news, sports, music, broadcasters, even finance) believe streaming content (mostly audio and video) to be more attractive than static content like pictures and text. In the long term, this development implies that the Internet may evolve into another broadcast medium, complementing/challenging the established value chains of TV and radio. New kinds of operating systems, middle-ware, store and retrieve mechanisms will be needed to support these capabilities.
• Internet or Intranet service providers have to supply a complete set of generic services including:
• Technical services needed to assure information transportation with an associated Quality of Service (QoS) and the access to common services such as directory, management, security (authentication and confidentiality).
• New functionality's within the routing devices needed to guarantee an end to end provision of these services
• Customer services including in particular:
• Internet based telephony services with new smart features like voice servers, translators, intelligent and cost effective routing of the communication through a panel of telecommunication operators.
• Audio and video conference systems, and collaborative working environments,
• Personal toolkit environment.
• End-users with their appropriate terminals such as personal computers, TV, radio sets, handsets and appliances will access to these services through new kinds of access points to the network (Edge Device concept), providing the negotiation/configuration needed to use efficiently the new capabilities.

This model can also be applied in a business environment to a corporation where the Internet service provider would be an internal department (the Intranet service provider). These new Internet services must be build to interconnect smoothly Intranets and Internets service providers or Intranets through an Internet. All this will put new requirements on the timely communication performances of IP networks, the management and protection of intellectual property (including billing and payment) as well as applications. Accomplishing multimedia communications over IP implies a paradigm shift for the communications world and involves many aspects.
To accommodate the needs for the next generation of services the future Internet has to take the nature of the transported data into account and should offer greater flexibility (smart networks). The goals of the project are to investigate new architectures, protocols and services to fulfill these needs. New classes of applications will be the driving factor for these new communication facilities. Applications in a large network (Internet) and in a closed network (Intranet) will be used to demonstrate the new communication facilities.

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