Transporting Production/Mastering-Quality Digital Video Signals through the Public Network Using SONET/SDH and ATM Technology

Abstract

This paper describes a method for transporting a variety of high-quality, standards-based digital video signals through the global synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) public network infrastructure by using cost-effective, flexible asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) technolog The difficulties of creating nonstandard SONET/SDH tributaries within concatenated synchronous transport signals are bypassed by using ATM-based multiplexing techniques. This approach greatly simplifies the design of SONET/SDH video terminal equipment, while permitting transmission of lower speed data channels along with the high-speed video signals along the SONET/SDH backbone With the use of the techniques described in this paper, any combination of digital video signals can be transported. Finally, due to the extensibility of ATM technology, these production-quality and mastering-quality video signals can be combined with lower speed, compressed video ignals in any feasible mix that does not exceed the maximum backbone bandwidth.