It is expected that most of the bandwidth in future high-speed networks will be taken up by multimedia applications, transmitting digital audio and video. Traditional networking protocols are not suitable for this as they do not provide guaranteed bandwidth, end-to-end delay or delay jitter, nor do they have addressing schemes or routing algorithms for multicast connections. Presenting recent research on the architecture and protocols for high-speed networks, this work focuses on communication support for distributed multimedia applications. This includes ATM Networking and quality of service for multimedia applications.