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

July 21^st 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.

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