10Gbps Super-net survives test
Posted by aco on 05 February 2002 - 10:49 · no comments & 217 views
About the Author
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
aco
Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
acoContact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Slashdot It!
Submit to reddit
Submit to blinklist
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add to furl
Share on Facebook
Add to Windows Live
Add to Google
The maiden voyage of the 10Gbps Ethernet, dubbed Super-Net, showed that a faster, more reliable internet is possible.
"We think this is the first serious use of 10Gbps Ethernet in Australia," CSIRO advanced networking R&D manager Dean Economou said. "This is the way the internet should work, but doesn't."
Super-Net is a key part of the federal Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE) project, supported by the CSIRO, Nortel Networks and Agilent Technologies.
In a demonstration in Canberra last week, researchers ran a virtual environment application that allows two people in different locations to work together on the same virtual 3D object at the same time. Real-time communication was established on a studio-quality video link.
These applications - a shared hapto (touch)/acoustic/visual environment and hi-fi audio/video over IP - may eventually be used to remotely train doctors in new surgical techniques, for example. But high-end applications such as these don't fare well on today's best IP delivery systems, which send data in bursts or fragments and can face transmission delays.
Super-Net has overcome these problems by implementing Nortel's Quality of Service on Ethernet switching.
QoS allocates priorities to some streams of data so critical applications get higher priority during periods of network congestion. To test the difference in performance, CeNTIE loaded Super-Net lightly at 9Gbps -- roughly the same as Sydney's phone system traffic at peak-hour.
Then, without using QoS, it put the last 1Gbps in, so the network was totally congested.
"First the video freezes, the haptics disappear, then the remote end starts wobbling and jerking and you're wondering what the hell's happening," Dr Economou said.
"Then we increase the QoS for the video stream and after about 10 seconds the video resyncs and bang, you've got video. But the haptics link is still broken so we increase the priority on the haptics traffic and bang, it's working again.
"The critical applications have a high priority so they're getting through no matter what."
The 10Gbps Ethernet will become very important in the next few years.
It's competing head-on with Sonet, the current standard in metropolitan area networks, Dr Economou said.