First Intercontinental Trial and Live Demonstration of Multi-Point Digital Video Tele-Conference, during the Beppu “ICOIN-15” Conference and the “Madrid Global IPv6 Summit”, inaugurating the first Link between Japan and Europe to further IPv6 collaboration

The Japanese Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications (MPHPT) is sponsoring a link between Japan and University College London (UCL) to further collaboration between Japan and Europe on IPv6 networking development. The link will be inaugurated on January 31, 2001 by a joint session of two conferences in Japan and Spain, with the participation of speakers from the UK. The two conferences are the IEEE 15th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-15), held in Beppu, Japan, January 31 - February 2, 2001 and the Madrid Global IPv6 Summit held in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain, January 29th to February 1st 2001. The themes of the ICOIN-15 (Navigating New Directions for Information Networking in the 21st Century) and that of the IPv6 Forum meeting (billed as the first Technological Event of the 21st century) are particularly fitting for this event.

The 45 Mbps link between Japan and UCL is being put in ostensibly as part of the new project IPv6 Wireless Internet Initiative (6WINIT), which is funded mainly under the Information Society Technologies (IST) program of the European Commission. University College London is the Coordinating Partner of this 10 MEuro, 2-year project, in which the Japanese Carrier, NTT, is an international partner. The new link will run exclusively the Next Generation Internet IPv6 protocols. Its use will not be restricted to the 6WINIT project, but will be extended to other projects, which would benefit from this high-bandwidth next-generation protocol link. It is intended that the UCL portion of the link be interconnected with other European Next Generation Internet services. Indeed, even this inaugural event already makes use of the British Telecom IPv6 Experimental Pilot, the British Telecom experimental LEARNET network, a Managed Bandwidth Service involving UKERNA (operating the UK National Research Network), DANTE (operating a pan-European Research network) and RedIRIS (operating the Spanish Academic and Research Network). On the Japanese side it uses the NTT Communications' Global IPv6 network, the Japanese Gigabit Pilot Network for R&D, the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) Next Generation Internet trial network and the Asia Pacific Information Infrastructure (APII) Network. In this inaugural event, high-performance videoconferencing facilities have been installed by the CRL in Beppu, El Escorial and UCL; this conferencing uses IPv6/ATM exclusively, operating at the full bandwidth of the link on a multi-site configuration.

"It is expected that this link will be the fore-runner of important international initiatives which will explore the problems remaining in transitioning the current Internet systems to the Next Generation ones. It is noteworthy that both the Japanese and the European networks are linked also to the US Internet-2 system; many other European research networks, e.g. the proposed pan-European GEANT, are also studying their transition to IPv6 protocols. Moreover, it should be noted that other partners in 6WINIT include the Korean ETRI research laboratory, the US WorldCom and the Canadian Communications Research Laboratory; although the 6WINIT inaugural meeting occurred only January 22/23 2001, further IPv6 international links are under discussion" stated Internet Pioneer Prof. Peter Kirstein at UCL.

We acknowledge many organizations, which have made this inaugural event possible. This has been partly by technical and financial support, and partly by making super-human efforts, breaking their established practices, to bring the disparate components together in time. The organizations contributing to this link include: British Telecom, Communications Research Laboratory, Consulintel, DANTE, European Commission, the IPv6 Forum, NTT RedIRIS, Telefonica, UKERNA, University College London, the University of London Computer Centre and WIDE.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Peter Kirstein                                         Kubota Fumito                         Jordi Palet
P.Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk                         kubota@crl.go.jp                      jordi.palet@consulintel.es
UCL                                                      CRL                                        IPv6 Forum - Consulintel

DVTS DEMONSTRATION - TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Digital Video is a high quality, high bandwidth video and audio format to deliver video/audio streams. In this case, the transport media will be IPv6, with international links of 45 Mbps.

DVTS (Digital Video Transport System - http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/pv2000/index.html) was developed in Japan to transmit high quality Digital Video streams without deteriorating the quality of the pictures, a very reasonable price, with short delays compared with MPEG-2.

This is the first trial in the world to have several remote sites using DV, interconnected with IPv6, allowing the simultaneous participation of relevant speakers:

· Hiroshi Esaki (Associate Professor - Information Technology Center - Tokyo Univ.)

· Kubota Fumito (Head, Communication Network Section – CRL)

· Latif Ladid (President, IPv6 Forum)

· Mario Campolargo (DG Information Society, European Commission).

· Peter Kirstein (Professor - Department of Computer Science, UCL)

· Seiji Tanaka (Vice-Minister of Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Post & Telecommunications)

· Shin-ichi Nakagawa (Team Leader, Next Generation Network Research Team - CRL)

The Layer-3 network is configured as show below. As a special challenge IP multicast technology will be used at both UCL and CRL sites.

Cooperating Organizations: