January 20, 2005

Real-Time HDTV Broadcast From USA
To Japan Enabled By Advanced Networks
Japan’s JGN2 Symposium 2005 Features Keynote Speaker Larry Smarr of UCSD Broadcast Live from Seattle over Advanced Optical Networks

By Doug Ramsey

Dignitaries and researchers attending the Japan Gigabit Network 2 (JGN2) Symposium in Osaka, Japan this week listened and watched as Internet visionary Larry Smarr gave the keynote presentation on a large high-definition television (HDTV) screen above the podium. Unlike traditional keynote speakers, Smarr was 5,000 miles away in Seattle, Washington, but the picture was so clear that Osaka attendees could even distinguish a hair on the speaker’s head.

Advances in transmitting live, uncompressed HDTV signals over optical networks are enabling true tele-presence, in which participants feel they are together in the same room. The Internet HDTV broadcast system used for this event was developed by the University of Washington for the Research Channel. A server in Seattle transmitted uncompressed, real-time, high-definition digital video and digital audio at very high quality and low latency to a client system in Osaka. Professor Smarr’s presentation originated on the University of Washington campus in Seattle and was transmitted at 1.5 Gbps to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP), then across a 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) transpacific link from Seattle to Tokyo, and then via the JGN2 to Osaka. The transpacific link was provided by the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF), and is managed by the PNGWG in Seattle and the WIDE project in Japan.

Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)²] and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project, talked about the emergence of a new cyberinfrastructure based on dedicated optical paths, in which distributed clusters and instruments are tightly coupled using wavelengths of light, or ‘lambdas,’ on single optical fibers. The ability to stream video at gigabits per second, like in this HDTV transmission, is enabling new modes of communication and collaboration. “The clear, crisp images and sounds that HDTV affords make for better dialogue and interaction with colleagues over distances,” said Smarr, who is also a professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Jacobs School of Engineering. “The goal is to make these sorts of communication technologies persistent, so that far-away colleagues appear to be just beyond the ‘Looking Glass’.”

In his talk, Smarr noted that Cal-(IT)² is incorporating advanced video-over-fiber networking technologies into its two new buildings at UCSD and UC Irvine. Facilities are slated to include a digital cinema and HDTV production facility, as well as dedicated meeting and public spaces with large-format displays to support tele-presence and collaboration. Said Smarr: “Every type of research will benefit if we can tear down walls and let scientists and engineers talk and work together in real time as if they were in the same room -- even if they’re thousands of miles away.”

Tomonori Aoyama, a professor of Information and Communication Engineering at the University of Tokyo, chair of the JGN2 management committee, and chair of the Symposium’s keynote session, expressed his sincere gratitude to all who contributed to its success. “The goal of the Symposium was to present the research and development activities taking place using Japan’s JGN2, operated by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NiCT),” said Aoyama. “I am very pleased that we used JGN2 and IEEAF broadband network technologies during the featured remote presentation by Dr. Smarr to explain the needs and applications for these technologies.”

JGN2, an advanced network testbed for research and development, is both a national and international testbed. It supports high-speed networking technologies and application advancements. Nationally, JGN2 is a 20 Gbps backbone network that has access points in all Japanese prefectures. Internationally, JGN2 connects Tokyo via a 10 Gbps link to the StarLight facility in Chicago, where it peers with the USA’s National LambdaRail, Abilene and other advanced international, national, and regional research and education networks.

“This is a milestone both in the use of technology and the establishment of a new high-water mark in extraordinarily close international collaborations.,” explained Ron Johnson, Vice President for Computing & Communications at University of Washington, “We are collectively managing dedicated lightpaths to carry uncompressed HDTV while at the same time supporting scientific research such as the Huygens Titan probe with a lambda-based network infrastructure that links Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. Colleagues at JGN2, WIDE, IEEAF, PNWGP, StarLight, the University of Washington, the ResearchChannel and other like-minded entities worldwide are working together to create ‘deterministic’ networks using multiple lambdas over optical fibers, to guarantee the bandwidth speeds and latency in order to do things like real-time HDTV transmission and remote steering of scientific instruments. We will continue to pursue this, to make applications like high-quality HDTV transmission both persistent and ubiquitous.”

Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, (858) 822-5825