Core Insights: TDM Mesh Networks - A Simple Alternative To Leaf-Spine ST2110

July 21st 2021 - 09:30 AM
Tony Orme, Editor at The Broadcast Bridge

IP is delivering unprecedented flexibility and scalability for broadcasters. But there is a price to pay for these benefits, namely, the complexity of the system increases significantly as we add more video and audio over IP.

Timing is fundamentally important to broadcast workflows for video, audio, and metadata streams. Although ST2110 has successfully abstracted away the media essence from the underlying transport stream, accurate timing is still needed.

In this Core Insight we look at an alternative to ST2110 while at the same time maintaining many of the benefits of IP. That alternative is TDM (Time Domain Multiplexing). Using high-speed fiber cabling and switching nodes doubling as SDI, AES, analog, and IP interfaces, TDM delivers mesh networks that provide broadcasters with a contrast to the leaf-spine model.

This Core Insight, sponsored by Riedel, discusses the benefits to IP by using TDM mesh networks. It describes how TDM works, why the signal latency is predictably low, and how a fully IP, SDI, AES and analog system operates.

With a specialist use-case outlining the Eurovision Song Contest, TDM mesh networks demonstrate how they overcome many of the challenges of ad-hoc live events.

Download this Core Insight now if you are a technologist, engineer, or their managers and you need to understand how TDM operates to keep infrastructures simple.

Supported by

You might also like...

Future Technologies: Timing Asynchronous Infrastructures

We continue our series considering technologies of the near future and how they might transform how we think about broadcast, with a technical discussion of why future IP infrastructures may well take a more fluid approach to timing planes.

Standards: Part 13 - Exploring MPEG4-Part 10 - H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC codec has been very successful. Here we dig deeper into how profiles and levels work to facilitate deployment of delivery systems and receiving client-player designs.

The Meaning Of Metadata

Metadata is increasingly used to automate media management, from creation and acquisition to increasingly granular delivery channels and everything in-between. There’s nothing much new about metadata—it predated digital media by decades—but it is poised to become pivotal in …

Designing IP Broadcast Systems: Remote Control

Why mixing video and audio UDP/IP streams alongside time sensitive TCP/IP flows can cause many challenges for remote control applications such as a camera OCP, as the switches may be configured to prioritize the UDP feeds, or vice…

Future Technologies: Autoscaling Infrastructures

We continue our series considering technologies of the near future and how they might transform how we think about broadcast, with a discussion of the concepts, possibilities and constraints of autoscaling IP based infrastructures.