Successful IP Multicast Ultra-High-Speed Transmission over 100Gbps Circuit of Uncompressed 8K Streaming Video of Sapporo Snow Festival

March 27, 2015

Succeeded in uncompressed 8K video multicast streaming transmission over a long-distance network
Transmitted multiple 24Gbps streaming with selective high resolution traffic monitoring from 10G to 40G on the 100Gbps circuit
A verified platform of high capacity & wide areas, with fully utilizing JGN-X, towards ultra-large amount distributed data processing

NICT, in collaboration with industry, government and academia, succeeded in accomplishing the world’s first long-distance transmission of 8K uncompressed multicast video streaming.

Fully utilizing JGN-X’s upgraded 100Gbps virtualized networks, the experiment had resulted a constructive use case from NICT’s past experiment in 2014 of 8K uncompressed video streaming transmission over 100Gbps circuit. NICT also held an open experiment event of this project at Knowledge Capital of Grand Front Osaka on Feb. 6, 2015.

Background and overview

The NICT builds and operates JGN-X, a research and development testbed network towards establishment of the New Generation Network. This time, NICT performed following experiments as an extensional effort from the last successful experiment of 8K uncompressed video streaming.

Utilizing JGN-X’s 100Gbps core circuits, NICT had built a network system for 8K/4K uncompressed IP multicast streaming to multiple locations between Tokyo-Osaka-Hokuriku. The shooting of ultra-high definition video had been done in the venue of Sapporo Snow Festival and areas nearby Sapporo. With the UHD video, NICT conducted the experiment with Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT) and other institutes, and proofed accurate performance in transmission of multiple qualities from HD compressed (30Mbps) to 4K and 8K uncompressed (24Gbps) to multiple location.
Toward stable operation of multiple virtualized circuits over 100Gbps bandwidth, NICT built a network monitoring system of selective high precision network analysis. Last year, NICT succeeded an experiment of analyzing selected 10Gbps from whole 100Gbps bandwidth. In this experiment, having further improvement on the system architecture, NICT built selective analysis with the maximum selected bandwidth of 40Gbps. This technology will enable us a high precision monitoring on a large data flow over 10Gbps, such as an 8K uncompressed streaming as well as its control packet. It will enable us a detailed analysis upon the troubleshooting phase.

NICT also performed 4K video international transmission to the venue of Next-generation TV and Ultra-high-speed Network Seminar in Bangkok, Thailand on Feb. 6, 2015.

The experiments had been done in cooperation with “Cooperating Organizations” in the Appendix.

Future prospects

The technology of multicasting over 100Gbps circuit will make those research experiments of large data transportation to the multiple sites more efficient, in terms of bandwidth and route selection. By providing advanced operation of 100Gbps circuit to JGN-X users, NICT will promote R&D activities toward realizing the New Generation Network which can adopt social big data processing and other emerging requirements.

Appendix

Experimental Network Overview

8K video uncompressed multicast and selective high precision network analysis

[Click picture to enlarge]

･ Multicast over ultra-high bandwidth (uncompressed 8K streaming)

- The first over-10Gbps-multicast experiment in the wide-area network
- 8K Stream selection in receiver side

Target: Large-bandwidth multicast testing with high precision analysis on 100Gbps circuit, for enough quality of commercial TV broadcasting.

Evaluate how a multicast function works properly (Join/Leave message for multiple large-bandwidth multicast streaming)

･ High-Bandwidth monitoring by parallel processing

- Evaluation of over 40Gbps processing by 10Gbps clustering architecture
- Monitoring over 80Gbps bandwidth

Selective use of 8K UHD contents

[Click picture to enlarge]

･ Send 3 types of 8K streams over multicast protocol

- Create multicast groups for each video program

- Video program switch can be done by multicast join/leave message from the receiving node.

-> Successfully demonstrated efficiency of multicast control under ultra-high bandwidth.

･ 8K video is converted to 4K (one source - multi use)

･ StarBED3 processes video streams same as the designated 8K server

Experiment Participants

1. Organized by

・ National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)

2. Cooperating Organizations (in no particular order)

Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
Sky・A Inc.
GAORA Inc.
Hokkaido Television Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (HTB)
NTT Corporation
NTT Communications Corporation
NTT IT Corporation
KDDI CORPORATION
Hokkaido Telecommunication Network Co., Inc.(HOTnet)
KYOWA EXEO CORPORATION
OBIS, Inc. （OBIS）
Fatware Inc.
Information Services International-Dentsu, Ltd. (ISID)
Cisco Systems G.K
Juniper Networks, Inc.
NEC Corporation
Ixia Communications K.K.
PFU LIMITED
Sharp Corporation

ASTRODESIGN, Inc.
Purelogic CO.,LTD
Trans New Technology, Inc.
digital research Inc.
Napatech Japan K.K.
GLEAN Corporation
Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.
IKEGAMI TSUSHINKI CO.,LTD.
nac Image Technology Inc.
Kanagawa Institute of Technology
Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Kurashiki University of Science and The Arts.
Nago City, Okinawa Pref.
Ginoza Village, Okinawa Pref.
Union-wide Municipal Affairs of Northern Area of Okinawa Prefecture
Specified NPO NDA
Cyber Kansai Project（CKP）
Nara City Sightseeing Information Center

Glossary

8K/4K

4K is a high quality TV standard for the Next Generation. In Japan, 4K service has been started since June 2016 by Next Generation Television & Broadcasting Promotion Forum (NexTV-F). It is expected that commercial 4K broadcasting service over CS and CATV will be started from this year. With 8 million pixels, which are 4 times larger than the current Full HD, it achieves very high-quality videos. 8K UHD is a new high-resolution television format which was developed by NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories along with other institutes. 8K UHD, also known as “Super Hi-Vision,” has 7,680x4,320 (33 million) pixels, 4x the resolution of 4K and 16x the resolution of Full HD. It is called 8K because the horizontal resolution is approximately 8,000. Japanese public broadcaster NHK is aiming towards 8K broadcasting service starting in 2020.

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IP Multicast

Unlike to peer-to-peer communication called Unicast, multicast enables one-to-many transmission. With this protocol, one data source can send its data to the group of multiple destinations. In multicast, data is replicated in the network nodes, and select a necessary route upon the request from the receiver. Having those features, multicast network can omit verbose data or unnecessary route in the transmission. Thus multicast network enables efficient transmission with minimum bandwidth usages. In this experiment, PIM-SM was used as a multicast protocol, and receiving data was selected by switching multicast group. This is the first case of IP multicast experiment in wide-area and over-10G bandwidth networks.

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JGN-X

A new network testbed environment to achieve the New Generation Network technology and deployment. NICT has been operating JGN-X since April 2011.

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Sapporo Snow Festival

A large winter event in Sapporo, Hokkaido attracting more than 2 million visitors every year. Dating back to the year 1950 when local junior and high school students gathered in Odori Park and created 6 snow sculptures, it continues to grow in participants and popularity with people from all over the world every year. The 66^th Sapporo Snow Festival was held from February 5 to 11, 2015.

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Joint research with Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT)

A joint research project over JGN-X for “Verification of streaming-cloud function with a real-time oriented network computer technology.” This was a joint project by NICT, KAIT, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, NTT IT Corporation, PFU LIMITED, NTT Corporation and ASTRODESIGN, Inc.

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High-resolution network measurement technology

viaPlatz stream monitor was used for the analysis. It is a network measurement system with 10Gbps capturing/generating functions. It was developed by NTT Network Innovation Laboratory and NTT-IT and is currently being used in wide-area experiments with cooperation by KAIT.

Also, ANUE Net Tool Optimizer from Ixia is used for extracting monitoring target flow from 100Gbps circuit. This enabled to analyze maximum 40Gbps data flow by parallel processing with multiple stream monitor. This is the enhancement from the last year’s 10Gbps analysis at one time. They also performed an experiment with 100Gbps prototype which is capable of direct analysis on a 100Gbps circuit.

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Next-generation TV and Ultra-high-speed Network Seminar in Bangkok, Thailand

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) in Japan and National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) in Thailand jointly hosted the event on Feb. 6, 2015 in Amari Watergate Bangkok. At this event, 8K/4K technology from Japan was introduced to over 200 attendees.

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Technical Contact

Tomoaki Takata
Network Testbed Research and Development Laboratory
Network Testbed Research and Development Promotion Center
Tel: +81-3-3272-3060
E-mail: