REAL-TIME AUDIO AND VIDEO TRANSMISSION OF IEEE-GLOBECOM-96 OVER THE INTERNET

This article is about the experiences of the authors in transmitting t he proceedings of some events at IEEE GLOBECOM '96 in London, England, in the week of November 17-22, 1996. Live video and audio of all the events in the Churchill Auditorium of the Queen Elizabeth II Conferenc e Center were captured and transmitted, in real time, as well as store d and transmitted later, for remote participants in three continents, over the Internet. Two independent systems were used simultaneously, o ne supplied by researchers from NTT Laboratories in Japan and the othe r by researchers from University College London. The former system is based on a server model of distribution, while the latter is based on the use of network-level packet multicast. Both systems employ compres sion algorithms, so the network capacity requirement in each case was on the order of 100 kb/s to 200 kb/s total, thus enabling remote parti cipants without very high-end network connectivity to take part. Recei vers only need software for a PC running most popular versions of Wind ows or a UNIX workstation to be able to receive either type of transmi ssion, or to retrieve the recorded sessions from NTT Laboratories' ser vers. The multimedia transmission was carried over care fully engineer ed links that traversed many different subnet technologies, including point-to-point circuits, SMDS networks, ATM networks, and fast Etherne t switches. This was both to give a high level of assurance that the t raffic would not experience too much interference from other traffic a t the site and elsewhere, and to ensure very low packet store and forw ard delays. The system ran for four days continuously, and was general ly very successful. In the future, it should be possible to have remot e paying attendees.