Internet Videoconferencing Backbone in US MBONE

From round-the-clock coverage of space shuttle flights to international broadcast of a complex liver operation to a Rolling Stones concert, the use and influence of the Internet has been extended by the multicast backbone (M-Bone). First used in a broadcast in 1992, M-bone is a virtual network that sends compressed audio/video data packets to multiple remote locations on the Internet as one data stream, minimizing duplicate transmissions. M-Bone enables users worldwide to not only see and talk to one another, but to also work on a shared electronic window called a whiteboard, or "infinite piece of paper." A principal creator was Van Jacobson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose team developed most of the user-friendly software tools. Although simple in concept, M-Bone is unique in its capability to dynamically construct distribution trees using the shortest, most efficient paths. This high level of efficiency is necessary to prevent congestion and collapse of the Internet, because the broadcasts usually include live video, which generates large volumes of data.

Scientific Impact: M-bone launched a new era in scientific collaboration. Not long after its introduction, M-bone was put into service routinely for collaborative work by more than 10,000 users at federal agencies and other sites in 30 countries.

Social Impact: More democratic than traditional videoteleconferencing, which joins a few sites with expensive dedicated transmission lines. M-Bone links anyone who has a workstation with audiovisual capabilities and a high-speed connection to the Internet.

Reference: Deering, S., Estrin, D., Farinacci, D., Jacobson, V., Lui, C., and Wei, L., "The PIM Architecture for Wide-Area Multicast Routing," IEEE/ACM

Transactions on Networking, Vol.4, No.2, April 1996. An earlier version, "An Architecture for Wide-Area Multicast Routing," appeared in SIGCOMM 1994, August 1994, pp. 126-135.

McCanne, S., and Jacobson, V., vic: "A Flexible Framework Framework for Packet Video," ACM Multimedia '95, November 1995, San Francisco, CA, pp. 511-522. (Best student paper award.)

Schulzrinne, H., Casner, S., Frederick, R., and Jacobson, V., "RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications," RFC 1889, January 1996.

URL: http://www-nrg.ee.lbl.gov/

Technical Contact: Thomas N'Dousse-Fetter, Mathematical, Information, & Computational Sciences Division, 301-903-9960

Press Contact: Jeff Sherwood, DOE Office of Public Affairs, 202-586-5806

SC-Funding Office: Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research