This paper and accompanying project examines which type of time-division multiplexing media access protocol, the Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) of Ethernet or the token passing of token ring, is best able to fulfill the stringent isochronous performance demands required of today's resource-hungry multimedia networks, specifically the requirements of high throughput, low latency and jitter, and minimal error rates. Using performance bounds accepted by other researchers as sufficient to ensure quality isochronous transmission, that of (1) the throughput rate being equal to or less than the playback rate; (2) the latency in transmitting each packet ranging from 20 to 400 milliseconds and the variance or jitter being less than 80 milliseconds; and (3) the rate of lost packets ranging from 0.01--1.001, this paper approaches a solution first from the theoretical and then integrates into the final conclusion an analytical, C++ software evaluation test component that models network performance under optimum conditions. The immediate benefit of the entire study is the identification of one media access protocol, Ethernet or Token Ring, over its counterpart as being superior for isochronous applications as defined by the above performance requirements, and the long-term consequence of this identification will be facilitating for future network designers, including those of digital libraries, the selection of the best network architecture for their multimedia environments
