Mbone Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Calhoun, Institutional Archive of the Naval Postgraduate School Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Faculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications 1994-04 MBone Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet Macedonia, Michael R. http://hdl.handle.net/10945/40136 MBone Provides Audio and Video Across the Internet Michael R. Macedonia and Donald P. Brutzman Naval Postgraduate School he joy of science is in the discovery. In March 1993, our group at the Naval Postgraduate School heard that the Jason Project, an underwater explo ration and educational program supported by Woods Hole Oceanographic IIInstitution in Massachusetts, was showing live video over the Internet from an under water robot in waters off Baja, Mexico. We worked furiously to figure out how to re ceive that video signal, laboring diligently to gather the right equipment, contact the appropriate network managers, and obtain hardware permissions from local bu reaucrats. After several days of effort, we learned that a satellite antenna uplink ca ble on the Jason support ship had become flooded with seawater a few hours before we became operational. Despite this disappointment, we remained enthusiastic because, during our ef forts, we discovered how to use the Internet's most unique network, MBone. Short for Multicast Backbone, 1 MBone is a virtual network that has been in existence since early 1992. It was named by Steve Casner1 of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and originated from an effort to multicast audio and video from meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Today, hundreds of re searchers use MBone to develop protocols and applications for group communi cation. Multicast provides one-to-many and many-to-many network delivery ser Researchers have vices for applications such as videoconferencing and audio where several hosts need to communicate simultaneously. produced the Multicast This article describes the network concepts underlying MBone, the importance of bandwidth considerations, various application tools, MBone events, interesting Backbone, which MBone uses (see the two sidebars), and provides guidance on how to connect your provides audio and Internet site to the MBone. video connectivity from outer space to Multicast networks under water - and Multicasting has existed for several years on local area networks such as Ethernet and Fiber Distributed Data Interface. However, with Internet Protocol multicast ad virtually everyplace in dressing at the network layer, group communication can be established across the In between. Anyone ternet. IP multicast addressing2 is an Internet standard (Request For Comment 1112) developed by Steve Deering3 of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and is sup can use it. ported by numerous workstation vendors, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, Digital 30 US govcrnmcnl work is no! pro!cctcJ by US copyright. COMPUTER MBone and distance learning at the Naval Postgraduate School Mike Mccann, NCAA and the lab at NPS, and could ask questions ()f the Naval Postgraduate Schoof Visualization Laboratory NCAA instructor over the network. Advar1ced preparation, good audio, and a camera operator in the NCARclassroom In March 1993, the W.R. Church Computer Center at the gave us a real. feeling of presence inBot.llder. "It wa$ justlike Naval Postgraduate School dedicated a Sun Sparcstation 2 being there," one of my classmates said. to act as a Multicast Backbone (MBone) router for the cam Paul Hyder of NCAR was. instrumental in helping set up a pus and the Monterey Bay research community. This router direct "backup" tunnel betw~en NPS and NCAR, where the and an IP-encapsulated tunnel from Stanford University slowest I.ink is the T1 line between NPS and Stanford. During provides the NPS backbone with real-time audio, video; and the course, there was only one 30-minute period of br:oken other MBone data feeds. up audio. We later determined that this interruption was The MBone is an excellent tool for those doing research in caused by congestion on NCAR'sEther.net LAN. networks and video teleconferencing technology. Although it For much of 1993, the NPS Visualization lab loaned a Sun is not generally thought of as "ready for prime time" (audio Sparcstation 10 to the Monterey Bay Aquariurn Research dropouts may be frequent and video, at best, is only 3 Institute for testing and incorporation into the live audio/video frames per second over the Internet), NPS successfully used link to the research vessel Point Lobos and the remotely it to provide training in Cray Fortran optimization from the operated vehicle Ventana that explbre the Monterey subma National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, rine canyon each day (see Figure A). Local res.earchers in Colorado. oceanography, virtual reality, and autonomous underwater Five people who would not have been able to afford to vehicles continue to take advantage of the. collaboration travel to Boulder remotely "attended" the three-day training opportunities that this technology makes possible. course at the NPS Computer Center's Visualization Labora It might not be too long before MBone enables us to video. tory. For the session, students - including myself - en conference with a classroom or a colleague half way around joyed two-way audio and video between the classroom at the world - directly from our desktop workstations. megrez3telnethp8502001 Trying134.89.2.200 ... Connect«! to hp850.mbartotg. E1capecharacteri:1 '"'l'. 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April 1994 31 Equipment Corporation, and Hewlett among the islands of MBone subnets Thus, a 128-kilobit per second video Packard. Categorized officially as an IP through Internet IP routers that (typi stream (typically 1-4 frames per second) Class D address, an IP multicast address cally) do not support IP multicast. This uses the same bandwidth whether it is re is mapped to the underlying hardware is done by encapsulating the multicast ceived by one workstation or 20. That is multicast services of a LAN. Two things packets inside regular IP packets. As in good. However, that same multicast make multicasting feasible on a world stalled commercial hardware is upgraded packet is ordinarily prevented from cross wide scale: to support multicast traffic, this mixed ing network boundaries such as routers. system of specially dedicated mrouters The reasons for this current restriction (1) installation of high bandwidth In and tunnels will no longer be necessary. are religious and obvious from a net ternet backbone connections, and We expect that most commercial routers working standpoint. If a multicast stream (2) widespread availability of worksta will support multicast in the near future, that can touch every workstation could tions with adequate processing eliminating the inefficiencies and man jump from network to network without power and built-in audio capability. agemenfheadaches of duplicate routers controls, the entire Internet would quickly and tunnels. become saturated by such streams. That The reason MBone became a virtual would be disastrous! Therefore, controls network is that it shares the same physi are necessary. cal media as the Internet. It uses a net MBone can control multicast packet work of routers ( mrouters) that can sup Bandwidth distribution across the Internet in two port multicast. These mrouters are either constraints ways: upgraded commercial routers, or dedi cated workstations running with modi The key to understanding the con (1) It can limit the lifetime of multicast fied kernels in parallel with standard straints of MBone is thinking about band packets, and routers. width. The reason a multicast stream is (2) It can use sophisticated pruning al MBone is augmented by "tunneling," a bandwidth-efficient is that one packet can gorithms to adaptively restrict multi scheme to forward multicast packets touch all workstations on a network. cast transmission. This is being tested. -- ' -- ... ·- .. .·:·~C~~~t~··~qieuce pver the MBone during the JasonPro~(!t~~L ,·- ·~ Ah~~M¥t:~1; W()ods Hole Oceanographic Institution anyone on the MBone who'fia~~·~o1~thefllouLAs sonar surveys progressedduringJ~.~xpedition,gatawas )J~$on~e~eais ?Jemotely ?Pe~ated, dual-vehicle sys transmitted back to shore, and tile :detaifeifmoctels were < 'tern dev~loped ~y the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu updated and then distrlbutedoveJ:lhelntemet . ~()ll for u~d~rwatef .s?ience and exploration. The Jason A workstation on board the LanejCfi~$tgenerated •·Foundation f?r r::o~cation uses this system as part of an multicast packets containing navigatlorran<iattitude infor • ~rinual.~?$On Pmjectexpedition; mation tor the three vehicles. Th~~ pa<;ketS:were dis-' During .1 ~9~, more than 600,000 K~ 12 students were tributed in real time over theM~oneso users running the •.