The multi-session bridge

Abstract

The Multicast BackbONE (MBone) is heavily used to carry Internet video conferences. The low cost and ease-of-use have made the MBone and its associated tools such as sdr, vat, vic, and wb very popular. But HEP video conferences often require many-to-many sparse network topologies, an arrangement that cannot easily take advantage of MBone efficiencies. Moreover, many HEP sites do not support multicast and thus researchers at those sites are cut off from important meetings. In addition, the topology of the MBone can cause poor performance or lack of access for some sites. To solve these problems, HEPNRC has developed the Multi-Session Bridge (msb) and its companion tool vtc. The msb allows an arbitrary number of multicast and unicast sessions to be connected in one or more seamless video conferences. Multiple msb's can also be connected to form a conference virtual network. The msb also extends MBone sessions to non-MBone sites through unicast streams. The msb is being extended to provide secure communications.