NCSA NEWS

Internet Audio Demonstration Wins SC2000 Award

released December 12, 2000

A demonstration of live, uncompressed CD-quality audio between Dallas, Texas and the Stanford University campus won the "Most Captivating and Best Tuned Award" award in the SC2000 Bandwidth Challenge Competition last week in Dallas, Texas."

The applications demonstrated two-way telephone-style communication, streaming audio without buffering from a remote tape deck, and an "audio teleportation" mode in which areas on the Stanford campus were outfitted with microphones and loudspeakers and users from the show floor in Dallas projected their voices into these spaces in multi-channel surround sound. At one point two musicians, from separate booths in Dallas, played "together" in the same space on the Stanford campus.

The high-fidelity audio required 750 kilobits per second per channel and provided stunningly good audio quality, despite induced congestion in the network. Reliable network performance for the application was guaranteed by quality of service (QoS) technology implemented in the Abilene Internet2 backbone, the Stanford campus LAN, and the SC2000 show floor. The demonstration used the Internet2 QBone Premium Service architecture as implemented in the Abilene Premium Service Test Program. This work builds on the Internet Engineering Task Force's work in differentiated services to provide more reliable network performance, including near-zero packet loss and bounded jitter to the application streams. For comparison purposes, QoS configuration was dynamically enabled and disabled via the Globus GARA tools to demonstrate QoS protection.

For more information about the Audio Teleportation demonstration and the Abilene Premium Service Test Program, see http://www.internet2.edu/abilene/qos/.

For more information about the SC2000 Network Challenge, go to http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/sc2000_netchallenge/.

For more information about Internet2 QBone, see http://qbone.internet2.edu/.

The Internet2 QBone initiative has brought together network planners, engineers, and advanced applications developers from across the research and higher education networking community to specify and build an interdomain testbed for IP QoS. The QBone architecture leverages the differentiated services forwarding primitives under standardization in the IETF and aims to provide a virtual leased-line service model across a highly instrumented and open interdomain testbed. For more information about QBone, see http://qbone.internet2.edu/.

The Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics is a multi-disciplinary facility where composers and researchers work together using computer-based technology both as an artistic medium and as a research tool. The SoundWIRE working group is exploring audio as an evaluation tool for network performance monitoring and high-quality audio transport for music production purposes. For information on CCRMA see http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/. For information on SoundWIRE see http://cmi2.stanford.edu:8080/soundwire/.

Led by over 180 US universities working with industry and government, Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnership of academia, industry and government that helped foster today's Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, see http://www.internet2.edu/.

 

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