Sinrace Power Supply Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.

The US-based standards organisation, the IEEE, announced the first standard in a project to synchronise audio and video communications has moved to sponsor ballot. The sponsor ballot stage allows interested parties to offer feedback on a standard draft proposal before it is forwarded for consideration as a formal standard.

IEEE P802.1Qav, “IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks - Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks - Amendment: Forwarding and Queuing Enhancements for Time-Sensitive Streams”, is said to improve streaming audio and video applications over bridged local-area networks (LANs) by providing performance guarantees that allow for time-sensitive traffic in a local area network and control delay, jitter and packet loss for wired, wireless and mixed wired/wireless L2 networks.

The organisation says when completed, the standard will allow streaming audio, video and related content to be delivered with a very small and bounded delay. “Current proprietary networks are hard to configure and very expensive,” says Michael Johas Teener, Task Group Chair for the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) task group. “Systems engineers want to use IEEE 802 standards-based networks such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi, but they also want a guarantee of low delay. They need a more self-configuring system, which the IEEE 802 AVB standards will provide without the need for time-consuming resource management.”

IEEE P802.1Qav is the first of the AVB standards going to sponsor ballot. The next two are IEEE P802.1AS, which specifies how to do precise synchronisation (allowing, for example, multiple networked loudspeakers playing the same audio signal to operate in phase, synchronised within one microsecond), and IEEE P802.1Qat, which specifies how to reserve resources in a network for delivery of video and audio streams.