Korea and Barcelona send HDTV over CA*net 4 with User Controlled LightPaths

Ottawa - Over the past week researchers at KISTI and the ANF in Korea and i2CAT in Barcelona Spain have been carrying out experiments by ransmitting HDTV video over Canada's CA*net 4 network. They have used User Controlled LightPaths which permits end user control of the traffic engineering of the IP network route. It also allows direct peering between Korea's KREOnet network and Barcelona's i2CAT network over the CA*net 4 network.

The HDTV transmissions were compressed HDSDI at 270Mbps, with the collaboration of Research Channel. For the first time, and HDTV over IP transmission spanned 3 continents, Europe, North America and Asia. They clearly demonstrated that Digital Cinema HDTV quality transmissions can work smoothly over such distances. The Korean team got several cultural productions about Gaudi architecture taped in HDTV format by i2CAT.

The User Controlled LightPaths used software, developed by the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa and the University of Ottawa, which has been deployed across the CA*net 4 network. The software developed under CANARIE's Directed Research program, and later enhanced under collaboration with the Technical University of Catalonia and the i2CAT Foundation allows authorized end users to reconfigure the direction and routing of  lightpaths across an optical network without requiring the signaling or permission of a central network administrator. Researchers at KISTI cross  connected their UCLP lightpath from Seattleto New York Citywhere it was cross connected to an MPLS tunnel that linked it to another UCLP lightpath configured across i2CAT.