IP: Big protocol on campus

Universities are making the most of advanced IP multimedia services.

By Phil Hochmuth
Network World, 05/21/01

While wireless on-demand IP video, long-distance and international IP telephony and Web-based unified messaging applications may be long-term projects or even pipe dreams for some enterprise IT departments, such services are a reality for students, faculty and staff on college campuses around the country.

Students and faculty at some of these institutions can experience benefits such as on-demand video learning and personal messaging applications that put a dorm-room answering machine to shame. Other schools are using Internet-based voice and video technology to let scholars communicate while saving money on long-distance telephone and videoconferencing charges.

"Our students are using tools that many businesses don't even have today," says Karen Thornton, director of the Hinman CEOs program at the University of Maryland. "They're becoming early adapters of state-of-the-art equipment and that in itself creates a different kind of student."

Universities have been the incubators for innumerable technologies that are now common to companies - Unix and Linux, the router, the Web browser, and, of course, the Internet. Now colleges are rolling out sophisticated IP communications and multimedia services that would make many Fortune 500 companies envious.

While it's not uncommon for college students to blow off the occasional class, students at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) who play hooky can access a digital video archive of a missed lecture or lab by logging on to the school's MediaVision streaming media system.

With one terabyte of archived multimedia content, CSUMB has the largest repository of digitized educational video content in the state, according to Lev Gonick, CTO at CSUMB.

At the heart of the system is an enormous 32-processor Silicon Graphics Origin 2100 streaming media server running Kasenna Media Base software, which is an on-demand video application for organizing and delivering content.

Gonick says digital media is recorded in six different formats - MPEG 1, 2 and 4; Quicktime; RealPlayer; and Windows Media Player - letting students choose a format suitable for their connection, "whether it's a remote student using a dial-up connection, wireless Ethernet users or switched Ethernet."

Gonick has also extended the video system to run over the school's wireless LAN infrastructure, which is built on Compaq WL wireless LAN endstations throughout the campus. Students use Compaq wireless PC cards on their laptops to access 1.5M bit/sec 802.11b Ethernet.

"Students can be sitting outside with a laptop and get full-motion, 30 frame/sec video," Gonick says, although this kind of access tends to bog down if more than 12 students are accessing wireless streaming video over one endstation.

"The 'Net as a learning tool has been singularly disappointing in my view, because it's been largely all about text. . . . That's really boring for a generation of students that's grown up on MTV," he says.

CSUMB's network backbone consists of a dozen Alcatel 5052 switch routers that keep the megabits of educational video traffic flowing around the campus, Gonick says. With input from administrators and faculty members from many departments, Gonick has used the backbone Alcatel switches to enforce network policies that give the right amount of bandwidth to certain applications, such as streaming video.

Quality of service (QoS) is even applied to different kinds of videostreams, based on the content-priority policies devised by Gonick and school administrators.

Streams of campus events, such as an address from the school's president, or distance-learning content for a large audience, could get more bandwidth than video content from other classes that only a few off-campus students may access, such as a movie or an archived lecture on video.

At the University of Maryland, the Hinman CEOs curriculum is a joint program run by the school's business and engineering schools, with the aim of creating tomorrow's high-tech entrepreneurs. The program was started in part by Brian Hinman, a UM alumnus who is not unfamiliar with IP multimedia technology - he was a co-founder of PictureTel and later went on to found Polycom.

Students in the program live in Garrett Hall, known as the "eDorm." This residence hosts a converged wired and wireless infrastructure with unified messaging applications from Avaya and PictureTel available to residents.

The eDorm's converged network runs on a rack of Avaya Cajun P550 switches in the building's basement linked via Fast Ethernet connections to dorm rooms.

The switches also provide QoS by reordering voice and data packets according to 802.1p priority bit levels (voice and video are tagged as "highest priority"). The Cajun switches connect to the campus backbone over a fiber-optic Gigabit Ethernet link.

The eDorm is hooked up with Avaya's WaveLAN wireless LAN endstations, which lets students access the campus net from any room or hall in the dorm. Students in the program are also given access to unified messaging technology from Avaya through Definity IP Softphones installed on their PCs.

While the dorm's network plumbing is probably more state-of-the-art than many companies, it's the applications that give Hinman students the extra edge as they attempt to start their own businesses, program director Thornton says.

"Students can be at home on spring break, skiing in Vermont or at friend's house, and they can check their voice mail for their business," Thornton says.

Avaya's Intuity multimedia messaging software lets students download voice mail messages as WAV files from a secure Web site on the company's Avaya ECLIPS IP 600 communications server.

Desktops in the eDorm are outfitted with loads of IP multimedia gear.

Hinman students' PCs are installed with videoconferencing software and cameras for their PCs that let them conduct face-to-face meetings over the Internet with potential business partners or venture capital firms interested in a student's idea.

PCs are also loaded with Avaya's unified messaging software. In the dorms, three conference rooms are equipped with Avaya Viewstation videoconferencing endpoints, which allow for larger groups in a videoconference.

When the Hinman CEOs program is moved to its permanent home next January, each dorm room will be outfitted with an Avaya Definity IP phone, making the entire dorm a converged network with no plain old telephone service lines installed.

At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), IP communication is being used to reach for the stars, save lives and make long-distance phone and video calls. The IP voice and video services developed at UNC come from the school's Center for Advanced Video Network Engineering and Research (CAVNER), which also works with other institutions and IT vendors on IP multimedia research.

UNC uses H.323 gatekeepers and multipoint control units (MCU) from RADVision around campus for long-distance videoconferencing with other schools and organizations. (Gatekeepers translate user names into H.323 addresses and control videoconferencing domains, while MCUs switch voice and video signals).

The school also has more than 300 IP video endpoints from Polycom and VCON, as well as Siemens IP phones, which are being tested for pure IP voice communication.

Applications for the system are many. Doctors and students at UNC's medical school can collaborate with patients and doctors in rural North Carolina. Scholars, such as professors in the Islamic Studies Department, can meet with colleagues from the University of Cairo in Egypt. Astronomy students use video connections to look through a telescope UNC runs at an observatory in Chil�.

UNC's long-distance H.323 voice and video services are also part of a larger initiative called ViDeNET, which runs over Internet2 and involves 65 universities, companies and institutions worldwide (see related story).

According to CAVNER Director Tyler Johnson, UNC's LAN is "completely overprovisioned" in terms of bandwidth to support the multimedia traffic it runs. The school's backbone is a mesh of Gigabit Ethernet connections that typically runs at only 13% capacity, he says. However, he is in the midst of working QoS into UNC's network with Enterasys switches.

Instead of controlling network QoS from large switch-routers at the network core, Johnson plans to enforce traffic rules with Enterasys Vertical Horizon switches, which provide QoS application mapping at the end-user port level.

"The other model is to have really smart routers in the middle of the network," Johnson says. "The problem with that is that doesn't scale. People are already finding out that CPU loads on routers are over the scale. We want to have intelligence in the network, but we want the work being done at port that the end user connects to."

IP: Big protocol on campus

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