A Poster About Our Work which has recently finished being funded but continues under other support. We await outcome of various followup project proposals.
We are CAIRN participants, with our own VC (1.5Mbps from UCL CS to US). Our 1998-1999 CAIRN Exerimental plans are available. A 2nd draft report about altq/cbq on cairn and an older draft report about altq/cbq on cairn has just been done.
RP Addressed Multicast Architecture work.
If you are interested in history, Peter Kirstein has written a 25th anniversary article.
A report on ICE'98 is available.
The 1996-1997 Work is on Mechanisms for Supporting and Utilising Internet Multicast Multimedia and an outline 98 quad poster of our work has just been done! and 97's quad chart is online too.
The administrative details are available plus plans for 98 and 99 all together, until middle of 1999
We took Minutes from the IRTF RM group meeting in memphis in April 1997, and are hosting the meeting in July 1998.
And we had a couple of retreats in the project: multimedia retreat #1, 8/8/97 recently, and helped with another multimedia retreat #2, 14/11/97
Reports for first half year. and second half year. and first quarter of 97 and second quarter of 97 and last year.
We have further developed the CBT multicast routing protocol which has been incorporated into Bay Networks' routers. We are also actively involved with the ongoing design of the PIM multicast routing protocol (phase 1 of which is currently deployed in Cisco routers) with the aim of making PIM deployable in a hierarchical Mbone without requiring global advertisement of rendezvous points. One suggestion for how this should be done is Hierarchical PIM, which has been presented in the IETF. This work is ongoing.
A QoS Multicast Routing protocol, YAM
We have integrated a twelve-country Mbone running over the European ATM Pilot into the Internet (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands. Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK. We have been using the Mbone tools over this Pilot. Experimentation with traffic policing was carried out on this network to determine a suitable range of traffic shaping parameters. We have developed a new audio conferencing tool called RAT which provides resilience to packet loss through the use of a low bandwidth redundant encoding without the need to increase playout delays. An extensive series of user trials was performed to determine the effectiveness of low bandwidth redundant encodings for repair of lost audio indicating this approach shows considerable promise. RAT was demonstrated alongside VAT during the multicast of the WWW 4 conference from Boston in Decemmber 1995. Our multimedia server now provides basic multicast recording and playback facilities for multiple media streams, with basic facilities for multi-level indexing of media streams and groups of streams. The basic facilities were demonstrated at Telecom 95 in Geneva. More advanced indexing, post-processing and syncronisation facilities are planned or under development. We have written sdr, a replacement for the sd session directory tool tool to provide enhanced session directory facilities for Mbone sessions, including the distribution of per-media encryption keys for multimedia conferencing, so that only authorised people can participate in secured conferences. We have been developing the Session Description Protocol and Session Directory Announcement Protocols within the IETF MMUSIC working group. Sdr was demonstrated during the Stockholm IETF, and has been available for anonymous ftp since November. We have also written network text, a scalable multicast-based shared text editor for use in Mbone conferences. This was demonstrated during the Stockholm IETF, and is the subject of ongoing development.
Other recent pieces of work include:
We also help coordinate the ICB
