• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.46 no.12
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• pp.108-116
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a Ethernet based audio distribution system with a new L1/L2 hybrid switching scheme, and evaluate its performance. The proposed scheme not only offers guaranteed low latency and jitter characteristics that are essentially required for the distribution of high-quality uncompressed audio traffic, and but also provide an efficient transmission of data traffic on the Ethernet environment. The audio distribution system with a proposed scheme consists of a master node and a number of relay nodes, and all nodes are mutually connected as a daisy-chain topology through up and downlinks. The master node generates an audio frame for each cycle of 125us, and the audio frame has 24 time slotted audio channels for carrying stereo 24 channels of 16-bit PCM sampled audio. On receiving the audio frame from its upstream node via the downlink, each intermediate node inserts its audio traffic to the reserved time slot for itself, then relays again to next node through its physical layer(L1) transmission - repeating. After reaching the end node, the audio frame is loopbacked through the uplink. On repeating through the uplink, each node makes a copy of audio slot that node has to receive, then play the audio. When the audio transmission is completed, each node works as a normal L2 switch, thus data frames are switched during the remaining period. For supporting this L1/L2 hybrid switching capability, we insert a glue logic for parsing and multiplexing audio and data frames at MII(Media Independent Interlace) between the physical and data link layers. The proposed scheme can provide a good delay performance and transmission efficiency than legacy Ethernet based audio distribution systems. For verifying the feasibility of the proposed L1/L2 hybrid switching scheme, we use OMNeT++ as a simulation tool with various parameters. From the simulation results, one can find that the proposed scheme can provides outstanding characteristics in terms of both jitter characteristic for audio traffic and transmission efficiency of data traffics.