SPRUIE9D May 2017 – May 2024 DRA74P , DRA75P , DRA76P , DRA77P
Audio Video Bridging is an ongoing project of IEEE 802.1 concerned with enabling low-latency streaming of time-sensitive audiovisual data over networks. Devices are designated as talkers (transmitters), bridges, or listeners (receivers). It is suggested that the maximum latency could be 2 ms over 7 hops for Class A devices and 20 ms over 7 hops for Class B devices. A hop is essentially a single local area network stage in the journey of a packet. Every time a bridge is encountered between one network section and another a hop is involved. One of the performance goals is that AVB streams will not use more than 75 percent of a link's bandwidth, leaving the remaining capacity for non-AVB streams.
The goal of developing AVB is simply--extend Ethernet's data-networking capabilities to the realm of reliable real-time audio/video networking.
An "Audio Video Bridging" network is one that implements a set of protocols being developed by the IEEE 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging Task Group. There are four primary differences between the proposed Audio Video Bridging architecture and existing 802 architectures (from now on the term "AVB" will be used instead of "Audio Video Bridging"):
The following sections describe the media transport protocols that work within the AVB framework.