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N-1-3-Casner, "Second IETF Internet Audiocast", by Steve Casner,
<casner@isi.edu>
The July IETF meeting in Boston marked the second step in a continuing
experiment that may eventually lead to geographically distributed IETF
meetings. Live audio and video from the IETF meeting site was
transmitted using IP multicast UDP packets over the Internet to
participants in 10 countries (AU, CA, CH, FR, JP, NL, NO, SE, UK, US).
The audio transmission was received by 170 workstations using built-in
audio hardware and packet audio software. This number is up from 20
for the first IETF "audiocast" in March, plus this time slow frame
rate video was transmitted and displayed via software decompression on
75 of the workstations. It is conceivable that by the next IETF
meeting or two, there could be more remote participants than local
attendees!
That's not to say we've overcome the need to travel to IETF. Remote
participants are able to talk back, as was demonstrated very
impressively during the open IESG meeting session, but remote
participation is not the same as being there. We hope to see two-way
video, "shared whiteboards" and other improvements added in the
future. However, we are a long way from being able to support full
participation in all the simultaneous working group sessions, not to
mention solving the problems introduced by a span of 16 time zones.
We must also wait for resource management to be implemented in the
Internet before real-time traffic can be accommodated on any
significant scale.
This experiment is largely a volunteer effort. Steve Deering and I
served as ring-leaders, but we were assisted by several people who set
up equipment and/or provided software: Bob Clements, John Curran,
Chuck Davin, Ron Frederick, Van Jacobson, Paul Milazzo, Jeff Schiller,
and Henning Schulzrinne. In addition, many people around the global
Internet provided multicast tunnel machines to build the largest IP
multicast topology to date -- at one point during the week, the
multicast routing table included 90 separate subnets.
Since IP multicast routing support has not yet been integrated into
many production routers, it is necessary to construct a virtual
multicast network of tunnels layered on top of the physical backbone
and regional networks. To reach the many more places that would like
to participate, we'd like to expand the IETF multicast topology to
form a semi-permanent Multicast Backbone, dubbed MBONE, to serve as a
testbed for continued experimentation.
To manage the growth, we're looking for assistance from regional and
backbone network providers to set up and operate multicast tunnel
machines and distribute the multicast traffic on to their customers.
To organize this effort, we've established some regional email lists.
If you are a network provider willing to help, please send a message
to the appropriate request-list for your area:
ozaudio-request@internode.com.au Australia
mbone-eu-request@sics.se Europe
mbone-request@isi.edu US & other
End-user sites who want to participate in IETF multicasts should
contact their network providers directly and encourage them to
participate!