IEEE Standard Moves to Sponsor Ballot

IEEE announced today that the first standard in a project to synchronize audio and video communications has moved to sponsor ballot. IEEE P802.1Qav, "IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks – Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks – Amendment: Forwarding and Queuing Enhancements for Time-Sensitive Streams," will improve streaming audio and video applications over bridged local-area networks (LANs) by providing performance guarantees that allow for time-sensitive traffic in a local area network and control delay, jitter, and packet loss for wired, wireless, and mixed wired/wireless L2 networks.

When completed, the standard will allow streaming audio, video and related content to be delivered with a very small and bounded delay. "Current proprietary networks are hard to configure and very expensive," said Michael Johas Teener, Task Group Chair for the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) task group within the IEEE 802.1 Working Group, in a prepared statement. "Systems engineers want to use IEEE 802 standards-based networks such as Ethernet and WiFi, but they also want a guarantee of low delay. They need a more self-configuring system, which the IEEE 802 AVB standards will provide without the need for time-consuming resource management."

IEEE P802.1Qav is the first of the AVB standards going to sponsor ballot. The next two are IEEE P802.1AS, which specifies how to do precise synchronization (allowing, for example, multiple networked loudspeakers playing the same audio signal to operate in phase, synchronized within one microsecond), and IEEE P802.1Qat, which specifies how to reserve resources in a network for delivery of video and audio streams.