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Mbone (short for " multicast backbone") was an experimental

backbone The backbone is the vertebral column of a vertebrate. Arts, entertainment, and media Film * ''Backbone'' (1923 film), a 1923 lost silent film starring Alfred Lunt * ''Backbone'' (1975 film), a 1975 Yugoslavian drama directed by Vlatko Gilić ...

and virtual network built on top of the Internet for carrying IP multicast traffic on the Internet. It was developed in the early 1990s and required specialized hardware and software.Lewis, Peter H
"Peering Out a 'Real Time' Window"
'' The New York Times'', 8 February 1995. Retrieved 26 August 2009. Since the operators of most Internet routers have disabled IP multicast due to concerns regarding bandwidth tracking and billing, the Mbone was created to connect multicast-capable networks over the existing Internet infrastructure.

History

Mbone was created by

Van Jacobson Van Jacobson (born 1950) is an American computer scientist, renowned for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling.

, Steve Deering and Stephen Casner in 1992 based on a suggestion by

Allison Mankin Allison Mankin is an American computer scientist and prominent figure in the area of Internet governance. She previously served as the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Chair and holds numerous leadership positions within the Internet Engineering ...

. On May 23, 1993, '' Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees'' was streamed over the Mbone, becoming "the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet." On June 24, 1993, the band Severe Tire Damage was the first to perform live on the Mbone. On November 11, 1993

Sky Cries Mary Sky Cries Mary is an American psychedelic rock/trance musical group from Seattle, Washington, formed in the late 1980s by Roderick Wolgamott. Early band influences included European industrial music bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten, Coil, ...

performed on the Mbone from Bellevue, WA sponsored by Starwave. A November 1994

Rolling Stones The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the g ...

concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas with 50,000 fans was the "first major cyberspace multicast concert."

Mick Jagger Sir Michael Philip Jagger (born 26 July 1943) is an English singer and songwriter who has achieved international fame as the lead vocalist and one of the founder members of the rock band the Rolling Stones. His ongoing songwriting partnershi ...

opened the concert by saying, "I wanna say a special welcome to everyone that's, uh, climbed into the Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the M-bone. And I hope it doesn't all collapse." A year later the Mbone was used, this time symmetrically (simultaneous transmission and reception without hierarchy among participants), for a first experience of real-time graphical interaction without the intermediary of any Center (

Poietic Generator The Poietic Generator is a social-network game designed by Olivier Auber in 1986, and developed from 1987 under the label free art thanks to many contributors. The game takes place within a two-dimensional matrix in the tradition of board games a ...

). By 1995, there were M-bone links in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eight ...

, as well as at the

McMurdo Sound McMurdo Sound is a sound in Antarctica. It is the southernmost navigable body of water in the world, and is about from the South Pole. Captain James Clark Ross discovered the sound in February 1841, and named it after Lt. Archibald McMurdo o ...

research station in

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest contine ...

. Mbone was used for shared communication such as

video teleconference Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio and video signals by people in different locations for real time communication.McGraw-Hill Concise Enc ...

s or shared collaborative workspaces. It was not generally connected to commercial Internet service providers, but often to universities and research institutions. Some other projects and network testbeds, such as Internet2's

Abilene Network Abilene Network was a high-performance backbone network created by the Internet2 community in the late 1990s. In 2007 the Abilene Network was retired and the upgraded network became known as the "Internet2 Network". History One of the aims of the ...

, made Mbone obsolete. A "virtual room video conferencing system" (VRVS) started operation in 1997 using the Mbone, and was in operation through 2008. A revived ''mboned'' (mbone deployment) working group was chartered by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2014, as a forum to coordinate and document multicast deployment challenges and best practices.

Details

The purpose of Mbone was to minimize the amount of data required for multipoint audio/video-conferencing. Mbone was free and it used a network of routers that support IP multicast, and it enables access to real-time interactive multimedia on the Internet. Many older routers do not support IP multicast. To cope with this,

tunnels A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, and enclosed except for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A pipeline is not a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube constr ...

must be set up on both ends: multicast packets are encapsulated in unicast packets and sent through a tunnel. Mbone uses a small subset of the class D IP address space (224.0.0.0–239.255.255.255) assigned for multicast traffic. Mbone uses 224.2.0.0 for multimedia conferencing.

Characteristics

* topology: a combination of mesh and

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth ma ...

networks *

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es: 224.2.0.0 * routing schemes: DVMRP,

MOSPF Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It uses a link state routing (LSR) algorithm and falls into the group of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), operating within a single autonomous sys ...

* session registration:

IGMP The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IPv4 networks to establish multicast group memberships. IGMP is an integral part of IP multicast and allows the network to direct ...

* traffic requirement: audio 32-64 kbit/s, video 120 kbit/s

Mbone tools

Videoconferencing Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio signal, audio and video signals by people in different locations for Real-time, real time communication. ...

: vic -t ttl destination-host/port (supports: NV,

H.261 H.261 is an ITU-T video compression standard, first ratified in November 1988. It is the first member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG, then Specialists Gro ...

, CellB, MPEG, mJPEG) * Audioconferencing: vat -t ttl destination-host/port (supports: LPC, PCMU, DVI4,

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such as ...

) *

Whiteboard A whiteboard (also known by the terms marker board, dry-erase board, dry-wipe board, and pen-board) is a glossy, usually white surface for making non-permanent markings. Whiteboards are analogous to blackboards, but with a smoother surface all ...

: wb destination-host/port/ttl * Session Directory: sdr * Collective art : gp (

)

References

External links

*
MBONE: Multicasting Tomorrow's Internet
': Classic book about MBONE, by Kevin Savetz, Neil Randall, and Yves Lepage, complete on-line
IETF MBONE Deployment working groupHow to connect to the MBoneAccessGrid.org
��Ajit S. Thyagarajan, Stephen L. Casner, and Stephen E. Deering, Proc. INET '95. Internet Society. May 10, 1995

Historical clients

LBNL's toolsMICE's toolsOpenMash
{{Authority control Internet architecture