UltraGrid

UltraGrid from The Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies (ANTLab) is a software for real-time transmissions of high-defintion video and audio. UltraGrid provides transmission of compressed and non-compressed video in maximum resolution 4K (4096@60p) through IP networks with latency 80ms.

For more information visit UltraGrid page.

Low latency 2K video transmission.

CoUniverse

For more information visit project site.

The grid environment is nowadays understood not only as a manner how to share computational resources or data storage facilities but may serve as well as a very high quality collaborative environment. High-quality videoconferencing environment must be able not only to transmit media streams with the best possible quality, but also it has to be capable of accommodating changes in the underlying infrastructure. While multipoint transmissions of low-latency uncompressed high-definition media streams at 1.5 Gbps provide desired quality, it has very high demands and lacks adaptivity to changing networking conditions. Another problem is that bitrate of such media streams becomes comparable even to the current highest-speed network links (10GbE or OC-192) and thus scheduling media streams to network links needs to be done carefully. Furthermore an environment comprising larger number components can become very hard to orchestrate manually and virtually impossible to react to network events in time short enough to minimize impact of events on the users‘ experience.

We have proposed a self-organizing collaborative environment framework for real-time network transmissions called CoUniverse. CoUniverse was designed as an application middleware capable of orchestrating collaborative environments like the one described above. It separates control plane from data plane, thus allowing for optimization of these two networks for different purposes. For the control plane, CoUniverse framework uses P2P network communication substrate which adds necessary robustness and reliability even on experimental infrastructures. We have designed CoUniverse as self-organizing system capable of automated user-empowered steering and encapsulating and controlling legacy media applications (i.e., third-party components of the collaborative environment which are completely unaware of the middleware). Our framework is also capable of responding to changes and outages of the underlying Grid (network and processing) infrastructure. CoUniverse introduces a concept of pluggable scheduler to address the self-organization aspect of the framework by the means of planning the transmissions of the media streams over particular network links and creating corresponding configuration for respective collaborative environment components. Not only that the streams with constant parameters can be configured to individual links, but strategies for using alternative streams and/or adjusting stream parameters may be defined. This allows for using, e.g., 250Mbps compressed stream instead of 1.5Gbps uncompressed when links required for 1.5Gbps stream are not available.

Presented system has been implemented as a prototype and successfully demonstrated at several occasions, e.g., during the GLIF 2007 workshop or SC’07 conference. In the paper we will discuss CoUniverse deployment experiences, observed issues and pitfalls and their solutions as well as plans for future functions and development. We will also show that CoUniverse framework is not limited to orchestrating of collaborative environments but may be used for more general purposes in the grid environment like high-speed data transmissions planning or general resource sharing.

For more information visit project site.