Unicast E1.31?

[Andrew Frazer]

Does, or could it be fesile for OLA to support unicast E1.31, from a statically mapped table of IP's and Universes?

[Simon Newton]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Andrew Frazer <andrew...@stellascapes.com> wrote:

Does, or could it be fesile for OLA to support unicast E1.31, from a statically mapped table of IP's and Universes?

It should receive it fine. As for sending, it's just a matter of code....

What's the motivation for using unicast?

Simon

 

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[Andrew Frazer]

Some people see multicast as "too complicated".    And they like to hard code everything and not leave it too the "magic"..

[Brian McKelvey]

To do multicast well on a large scale, you have to have higher end managed switches and know how to configure them appropriately, which takes more I.T. chops than many people possess, possibly even requiring working with a serial terminal.  That said, properly configured switches with multicast data can potentially handle that large scale scenario's bandwidth substantially better than unicast if there are multiple receivers listening for the same universe of data.

For further investigation if you're interested, the folks at Axia have learned and published a lot on this topic as it relates to their LiveWire IP-Audio technology.  They use standard Ethernet as transport for all audio sources, destinations, and mixing consoles in complex multi-studio radio and broadcast facilities.  Their devices constantly stream 48Khz/24-bit uncompressed audio onto the network as a multicast stream per source, with potentially thousands of sources on a single network that can be subscribed to, routed, and received anywhere in the facility, all through standard managed ethernet switches -- all with an input to output latency of less than 3ms.  It's impressive stuff and some of their white papers that are on their site may shed some insights on working with multicast for E1.31 as well.  They, for example, require managed switches, and recommend only Cisco switches due to improper or incomplete multicast implementations in other brands.

www.axiaaudio.com

Brian

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[Andrew Frazer]

On 17/05/2013, at 9:49 AM, Brian McKelvey <thetu...@gmail.com> wrote:

To do multicast well on a large scale, you have to have higher end managed switches and know how to configure them appropriately, which takes more I.T. chops than many people possess, possibly even requiring working with a serial terminal.  That said, properly configured switches with multicast data can potentially handle that large scale scenario's bandwidth substantially better than unicast if there are multiple receivers listening for the same universe of data.

Absoutely. Many "network" people don't' understand multicast, ethernet, etc etc, when it works and if it breaks, well debugging it is an entire new set of "dramas".       I've recently helped some very confident lighting folks get a system going ( they are not stupid, they just dpnot' have the experience of in depth networking i do, ( 20 years prior to being in this new game )..   Sometimes its easy for us very tech biased people to forget that it can and is complicated.

For further investigation if you're interested, the folks at Axia have learned and published a lot on this topic as it relates to their LiveWire IP-Audio technology.  They use standard Ethernet as transport for all audio sources, destinations, and mixing consoles in complex multi-studio radio and broadcast facilities.  Their devices constantly stream 48Khz/24-bit uncompressed audio onto the network as a multicast stream per source, with potentially thousands of sources on a single network that can be subscribed to, routed, and received anywhere in the facility, all through standard managed ethernet switches -- all with an input to output latency of less than 3ms.

It is the way that i would build an audio distribution as well.. It makes sense.. Problem is if you receive, / mix / retransmit you can start to get to 10ms+ without too much trouble, and for some apps,  10mS is a bit long. But for audio distribution, no problem at all.

[Brian McKelvey]

They manage to maintain <3ms for that very application. Straight input to output latency of an Axia system without mixing is <1.5ms. Running through the mix engine takes it to about 3ms. Thats on 100 megabit Ethernet. Their system is designed around 100 megabit, using gigabit only for uplinking additional switches. It's very impressive!

Brian

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[Andrew Frazer]

source ---->ethernet -->- mixer ---->- ethernet -----> receiver less than 3ms?

[Brian McKelvey]

Yes.

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[Andrew Frazer]

wowsers. hat is impressive.

[Brian McKelvey]

Yup!

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