MBONE: Multicasting Tomorrow's Internet

Basic Events

I call those basic events because they are the base of the MBONE. They are what the MBONE has been created for. I am referring to the broadcasts of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meetings.

During these meetings, people from various workgroups meet, exchange, adopt resolutions, and so on. Results from workgroups are broadcasted on the MBONE. These events are a great source of information on upcoming technology or protocols. Sometimes, the slides of the presentation are made available via the whiteboard, and most often you see them in the video session. These sessions are among the most popular. The IETF holds these meetings several times per year, and some of them are used as testbeds for new protocols or new tools. (The December 1994 IETF meeting was the one in which VIC was tried for the first time. We discovered that VIC could produce a frame rate about 30 times higher than that of NV's, for the same amount of bandwidth!)

For testing purposes, some sessions are always present. These sessions have titles such as "MBONE video" or "MBONE audio." All users can join them and test their setup by sending small amounts of video or audio.

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