The provision and support of new distributed
multimedia services are of prime concern for telecommunications operators and
suppliers. Clearly, the potential of the latest Internet protocols to
contribute communications components is of considerable interest to them. In
this article we first review some of the new types of application and their
requirements, and identify the need to support applications that have strict
QoS requirements, the so-called critical applications. We review two proposals
for enhancing the Internet service architecture. In addition to the integrated
services work of the IETF, we look at the more recent proposals for
differentiated services in the Internet. We then individually review recent
protocol developments proposed to improve the Internet, and to support
real-time and multimedia communications. These are IPv6 (the new version of the
Internet Protocol), Resource reSer-Vation Protocol, and Multiprotocol Label
Switching, respectively. In each case, we attempt to provide critical reviews
in order to assess their suitability for this purpose. Finally, we indicate
what the basis of the future infrastructure might be in order to support the
full variety of application requirements.