NTT touts NICT demonstration of on-demand gigabit-class video transmission

NOVEMBER 17, 2009 -- Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) says it has developed a novel technology that enables on-demand transmission of gigabit-class wideband video. The company asserts it verified the video transmission technology via a wide-area experiment in cooperation with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

NTT says that using the video transmission technology, users can achieve steady transmission of high-density video such as HDTV by acquiring a path in the network whenever it is needed, without allocating additional network resources or re-optimizing the provisioned network resources.

The experiment was carried out using GEMnet2 and JGN2plus, the R&D testbed networks provided by NTT and NICT, respectively. The development was sponsored in part by NICT, under the "Research and Development of Dynamic Network Technology" project.

NTT laboratories had previously developed a technology to transmit uncompressed video streams through IP networks, which they called i-Visto. However, since it required a very large bandwidth of more than a gigabit per second, users could not immediately start the transmission unless they waited for the network operator to allocate the necessary network resources along the transmission path.

Moreover, to prevent quality degradation, the accuracy of the video stream packets must be verified at multiple points in the network. However, because this requires special equipment that can be too expensive to distribute to many points in the network, video transmission with i-Visto was not considered feasible.

The new technology leverages high-speed IP-optical networking. This consists of a technology that automatically sets up a very large bandwidth circuit in the optical network on demand (upon the user’s request to start video transmission) and a PC-based technology that can be placed at many points in the network with the ability to observe any minute change in the behavior of the video stream packets.

NTT says it verified the concept through the actual deployment of uncompressed HDTV transmission in a wide-area experiment network. NTT believes that these achievements will lead to widespread use of gigabit-class video transmission.

The technologists are planning further enhancements to network and video collaboration that will enable greater functionality, such as adaptive control, so that it can be employed by broadcasters and other high-end users. NTT’s aim is for this technology to eventually be used in other arenas that can benefit from high-resolution video, including telemedicine and e-learning.

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