TrueCircuit™ Technology: Distribution of Video / Audio / Control and Meta Data via a Paradigm IP Network using QoS, High Bandwidth Efficiency, and Low Latency

More and more broadcast stations, Production, and Post-Production houses are planning to use standard IP networks to distribute video, audio, control, and meta data in real time. Standard Ethernet networks suffer from problems such as, non-deterministic bandwidth, latency and excessive jitter for reliable real time transport of video/audio. — Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) and packet switching have long been the underlying technology for computer networks and the Internet, but are now barely used for voice and video communications. This is due to the unreliable and unpredictable nature, of the so-called “best-effort” service provided by IP networks. This result in a high degree of uncertainty in how quickly a packet will be delivered to its destination. — New real-time Internet protocols are being developed to guarantee a requested quality of service over an Internet connection. However even where implemented, they do not guarantee end-to-end delay or latency only bandwidth. Without latency guarantees, IP networks will not be truly able to distribute real time video and audio content. — TrueCircuit™ technology has been developed to provide QoS guarantees over Ethernet LANs and WANs. This technology involves conditioning real-time traffic before it is transmitted. TrueCircuit™ provides a proprietary virtual circuit protocol that enables real-time traffic flow. TrueCircuit™ equipment allows complete backward compatibility with standard IEEE 802.3 Ethernet. In a fully integrated TrueCircuit™ environment the bandwidth efficiency can increase up to 94% while guaranteeing very low latency through the IP network. — The paper will address first the legacy issues of standard Ethernet networks. Then it will describe the TrueCircuit™ technology, the critical missing link in this technology revolution and how the Broadcast, Production, and the Post Production facilities can benefit using this technology in the very near future.

Published

2000-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00144

ISBN

978-1-61482-933-1