RFC 1257 (rfc1257) - Page 2 of 5
Isochronous applications do not require jitter-controlled networks
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1257 Isochronous and Jitter September 1991
workstations, then beyond sensitivity to interarrival times, the
users will also be sensitive to end-to-end delay. Consider the
difference between conferencing over a satellite link and a
terrestrial link. Furthermore, for the data to be able to arrive in
time, there must be sufficient bandwidth. Bandwidth requirements are
particularly important for video: HDTV, even after compression,
currently requires bandwidth in excess of 100 Mbits/second.
Because multimedia applications are sensitive to jitter, bandwidth
and delay, it has been suggested that the networks that carry
multimedia traffic must be able to allocate and control jitter,
bandwidth and delay [1,2].
This memo argues that a network which simply controls bandwidth and
delay is sufficient to support networked multimedia applications.
Jitter control is not required.
Isochrony without Jitter Control
The key argument of this memo is that an isochronous service can be
provided by simply bounding the maximum delay through the network.
To prove this argument, consider the following scenario.
The network is able to bound the maximum transit delay on a channel
between sender and receiver and at least the receiver knows what the
bound is. (These assumptions come directly from our assertion that
the network can bound delay). The term "channel" is used to mean
some amount of bandwidth delivered over some path between sender and
receiver.
Now imagine an operating system in which applications can be
scheduled to be active at regular intervals. Further assume that the
receiving application has buffer space equal to the channel bandwidth
times the maximum interarrival variance. (Observe that the maximum
interarrival variance is always known - in the worst case, the
receiver can assume the maximum variance equals the maximum delay).
Now consider a situation in which the sender of the isochronous data
timestamps each piece of data when it is generated, using a universal
time source, and then sends the data to the receiver. The receiver
reads a piece data in as soon as it is received and and places the
timestamped data into its buffer space. The receiver processes each
piece of data only at the time equal to the data's timestamp plus the
maximum transit delay.
I argue that the receiver is processing data isochronously and thus
we have shown that a network need not be isochronous to support
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