Real-time audio and video transmission of IEEE GLOBECOM '96 over the Internet

C. Perkins, J. Crowcroft
1997 IEEE Communications Magazine  
This article is about the experiences that we had in transmitting the proceedings of some events at the IEEE Globecom '96 in London, England, in the week of 17-22 November, 1996. Live Video and Audio of all of the events in the Churchill Auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center we captured and transmitted, in real time, as well as stored and transmitted later, for remote participants in 3 continents, over the Internet. Two independent systems were used simultaneuously, one
more » ... by researchers from NTT laboratories in Japan, and the other by researchers from UCL. The former system is based on a server model of distribution 1 , whilst the latter is based on the use of network level packet multicast. Both systems employ compression algorithms so that the network capacity requirement in each case was of the order of 100 kbps to 200 kbps total, thus enabling remote participants without very high end network connectivity to take part. Receivers neeed only software for a PC runing most popular versions of Windows or a Unix workstation to be able to receive either type of transmission, or to retrieve the recorded sessions from NTT laboratories' servers. The multimedia transmission was carried over carefully engineered links that traversed many different subnet technologies, including point-to-point circuits, SMDS networks, ATM networks, and fast Ethernet switches. This was both to give a high level of assurance that the traffic would not experience too much interference from other traffic at the site and elsewhere, and to ensure very low packet store and forward delays. The system ran for 4 days continuously, and was generally very succesful. In the future, it should be possible to have remote paying attendees.
doi:10.1109/35.570716 fatcat:cwctrgrftzbmnjdihnibkfbo5u