SEMICONDUCTOR MEMORY BASED SERVER FOR PROVIDING MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION ON DEMAND OVER WIDE AREA NETWORKS

摘要

A method and apparatus for delivering multimedia video data from a server (h ost processor) to a plurality of clients connected to a communications network. More speci fically, with this invention, preprocessed video and multimedia data packets are stored in swit ches of the network. When a client desires to receive the video and multimedia data, sen ds a request to the host processor which in turn sends a control message to the switches sto ring the requested data. These switches in turn send the requested data to the requesting clien t. If the data is not stored in the switches, the data must then be forwarded directly from th e server to the requesting client.