IEEE 802.1 AVB - The Future of Audio Transport or Just Another Standard?
by Jonathan Novick
presented by Michael Johas Teener
The great thing about audio networking standards is that there are so many to choose from. Or, is it?
Audio over Ethernet is nothing new. Rocknet, A-Net, Cobranet, EtherSound, AES50, HyperMAC, and Optocore are just some of the names of “standards” in common use today for professional audio. Most of these are proprietary. Some are licensed to multiple vendors and each purports to have an advantage over the others. However they all suffer one or more deficiencies such as the use of a dedicated network or hardware from only one or a very select few vendors.
Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on that network (value = f(n2)). Proprietary networks are therefore of limited value. It seems that if we want to increase the value of our audio network, we would want it to be compatible with other network traffic. This is exactly what the 802.1 Audio Video Bridging (AVB) standard sets out to do.
IEEE 802.1 AVB supports synchronous audio and video over a public network with a guaranteed maximum latency that can be defined by the user. This could have tremendous ramifications for commercial, professional, consumer, automotive and infotainment industries. That is why networking giants such as Broadcom, Cisco, Intel as well as many pro audio brands such as Harman, Bosch, Avid, Yamaha and many others have all joined the AVnu Alliance to promote the adoption of 802.1 AVB.
This month, Michael Johas Teener will be on hand to provide a technical overview of 802.1 AVB and performance results achieved so far. Mr. Johas Teener is currently a Senior Technical Director at Broadcom with major responsibilities for time-sensitive and high performance/low cost network technologies. He is also chair of the IEEE 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging Task Group.
Prior to Broadcom, he was a Plumbing Architect at Apple (a title that he also held from 1988 until 1996 where he was the chief architect of Apple Computer’s FireWire effort.) Between his two stints at Apple he was Chief Technology Officer of Zayante, Inc., a FireWire technology provider. He is also the former chair and editor of IEEE Std. 1394-1995 and a number of the 1394 amendments.
Mr. Johas Teener has a BS from Caltech, an MS from UCLA, and holds 29 patents (and over 20 more in process,) mostly related to telecom, FireWire, and time-sensitive networking. His career began with 8 years of real-time software and computer hardware design for very leading-edge radar and sonar systems and he was the primary hardware architect for two early digital PBXs (including the first use of Ethernet in a distributed telephone switching system.)