Many future applications will require guarantees on network performance, such as bounds on throughput, delay, delay jitter, and reliability. To address this need, the authors have designed, simulated, and implemented a suite of network protocols to support real-time channels (network connections with mathematically provable performance guarantees). The protocols, which constitute the prototype Tenet real-time protocol suite (Suite 1), run on a packet-switching internetwork and can coexist with the popular Internet protocol suite. The authors rely on the use of connection-oriented communication, per-channel admission control, channel rate control, and priority scheduling. This protocol suite is the first set of transport and network-layer communication protocols that can transfer real-time streams with guaranteed quality in packet-switching internetworks. The authors have performed a number of experiments and demonstrations on multiple platforms using continuous-media loads (particularly video). The results show that the approach is both feasible and practical to build, and that it can successfully provide performance guarantees to real-time applications. The paper describes the design and implementation of, the suite, the experiments performed, and some of the lessons learned.