Carriage of audiovisual signals in their digital form across television plants has historically been achieved using coaxial cables that interconnect equipment through Serial Digital Interface (SDI) ports. The SDI technology provides a reliable transport method to carry a multiplex of video, audio and metadata with strict timing relationships.

The features and throughput of IP networking equipment having improved steadily, it has become practical to use IP switching and routing technology to convey and switch video, audio, and metadata essence within television facilities.

Existing standards such as SMPTE ST 2022-6:2012 have seen a significant adoption in this type of application where they have brought distinct advantages over SDI, albeit only performing Circuit Emulation of SDI (i.e.; Perfect bit-accurate transport of the SDI signal contents).

However, the essence multiplex proposed by the SDI technology may be considered as somewhat inefficient in many situations where a significant part of the signal is left unused if little or no audio and/or ancillary data has to be carried along with the video raster, as depicted in Figure QQQQ-1 below:

As new image formats such as UHD get introduced, the corresponding SDI bit-rates increase, way beyond 10Gb/s and the cost of equipment at different points in a video system to embed, de-embed, process, condition, distribute, etc. the SDI signals becomes a major concern.

Consequently there has been a desire in the industry to switch and process different essence elements separately, leveraging the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of commodity networking gear and servers.

The Video Services Forum (VSF) has authored its Technical Recommendation #3 (a.k.a. VSF-TR03) describing the principles of a system where streams of different essences (namely video, audio, metadata to begin with) can be carried over an IP-based infrastructure whilst preserving their timing characteristics.

The TR03 work prepared by VSF has been handed off to the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE) for due standardization process, resulting in the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards. SMPTE ST 2110-10, 20 and 30 were approved on September 18, 2017:

The ST 2110 family of standards expands over time and the corresponding DICOM components may consider adopting these extensions (e.g., compressed video, large metadata support…).

The system is intended to be extensible to a variety of essence types, its pivotal point being the use of the RTP protocol. In this system, essence streams are encapsulated separately into RTP before being individually forwarded through the IP network.

A system is built from devices that have senders and/or receivers. Streams of RTP packets flow from senders to receivers, however senders have no explicit awareness or coordination with the receivers. RTP streams can be either unicast or multicast, in which case multiple receivers can receive the stream over the network.

Devices may be adapters that convert from/to existing standard interfaces like HDMI or SDI, or they may be processors that receive one or more streams from the IP network, transform them in some way and transmit the resulting stream(s) to the IP network. Cameras and monitors may transmit and receive elementary RTP streams directly through an IP-connected interface, eliminating the need for legacy video interfaces.

Proper operation of the ST 2110 environment relies on a reliable timing infrastructure that has been largely inspired by the one used in AES67 for Audio over IP.

Inter-stream synchronization relies on timestamps in the RTP packets that are sourced by the senders from a common Reference Clock. The Reference Clock is distributed over the IP network to all participating senders and receivers via PTP (Precision Time Protocol version 2, IEEE 1588-2008).

Synchronization at the receiving device is achieved by the comparison of RTP timestamps with the common Reference Clock.

DICOM devices, which typically support NTP, will need to handle PTP to use this functionality, which may involve hardware changes. Each device maintains a Media Clock which is frequency locked to its internal time-base and advances at an exact rate specified for the specific media type. The media clock is used by senders to sample media and by receivers when recovering digital media streams. For video and ancillary data, the rate of the media clock is 90 kHz, whereas for audio it can be 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, or 96 kHz.

For each specific media type RTP stream, the RTP Clock operates at the same rate as the Media Clock.

ST 2110-20 specifies a very generic mechanism for RTP encapsulation of a video raster. It supports arbitrary resolutions, frame rates, and introduces a clever pixel packing accommodating an extremely wide variety of bit depths and sampling modes. It is very heavily inspired from IETF RFC4175.

ST 2110-21 specifies traffic shaping and delivery timing of uncompressed video, in order to enable transport of multiple videos on the same physical network.

ST 2110-30 specifies a method to encapsulate PCM digital audio using AES67 to which it applies a number of constraints. AES67 is a technical standard for audio over IP and audio over Ethernet. The standard was developed by the Audio Engineering Society.

ST 2110-40 specifies a simple method to tunnel packets of SDI ancillary data present in a signal over the IP network and enables a receiver to reconstruct an SDI signal that will embed the ancillary data at the exact same places it occupied in the original stream.

Sender devices construct one SDP (Session Description Protocol) object per RTP Stream. These SDP objects are made available through the management interface of the device, thereby publishing the characteristics of the stream they encapsulate, however no method is specified to convey the SDP object to the receiver. Implementations can rely on web URLs, files or documentation on media, or it can be configured on the receiver from product documentation since it can be relatively static. This SDP object provides the basic information a system needs in order to identify the available signal sources on the network.

It is worth noting that although ST 2110 currently describes the method for transporting video and audio, the same principles may be applied to other types of media by selecting the appropriate RTP payload encapsulation scheme, and complying to the general principles defined by ST 2110-10.

Some details of the ST 2110-10 are reproduced below for convenience. Refer to the original specifications for implementation.

The RTP header bits have the following format:

With:

The RTP header extension bits have the following format:

With:

In complement to the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, AMWA (Advanced Media Workflow Association) has authored a recommendation called NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) which specifies the following header extensions: