Our relaying-stations are set up in the observation sites of the world, and the live pictures are transmitted to our ENOC - Encoding and Network Operations Center - in Japan by using the Internet technology.

We get IP connectivity for relay to ENOC as follows. We use Inmarsat satellite phones at Nakanoshima (Japan), Tinian island (Mariana Islands) and Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) where there is lack of IP connectivity, while we use an ISDN line from Katsushika-ku (Japan) and the Internet link from Seoul (Korea). Our WindowsMedia encoders at the observation sites are IP reachable, and thus we can transmit the live video streams to ENOC.

This is just the way established by LIVE! UNIVERSE who has carried out the various on-the spot broadcastings of the rare astronomical phenomena in the world, working hard to get those clear pictures in the expert way under limitation of link bandwidth.

The live video streams are received and played back by WindowsMedia players at ENOC in Japan. Once played back, the live videos are transmitted to the video editing equipments through the scan converters.

ENOC is a word coined through the past activities of LIVE! series that have needed both the network operations and encoding operations. ENOC is a sort of an event control center to proceed both the encoding and the network operation needed for relay.

Dozens of staff get together at ENOC every time. They take charge of the various tasks using computers and editing systems, say video encoding, remote server maintenance, IRC communication and etc.

Web servers are hosted at more than 4 Websites including the overseas sites. We use Apache Web server running on a UNIX box, and some sites use Apache version 2. Our Web servers support IPv6.

HTML contents are compiled on a single disk volume, and then they are mirrored to each Website by means of rsync over ssh.

"Tenbin and RADIX" technologies are deployed for load balancing of the globally dispersed Web servers. Tenbin works as a DNS server. RADIX gathers BGP-4 route information useful to the server selection. This load balancing mechanism functions as follows. At first, a Web client requests to resolve the name, "www.live-eclipse.org" in order to access a Web server among our mirroring servers. Next, Tenbin transfers the IP address of the client (to be exact, a local DNS server around the client) to RADIX. RADIX compares the IP address with the BGP-4 route information in its own memory, and then returns the AS path information. Tenbin returns an appropriate IP address of the Web server on the basis of the pre-configured load balancing rule with the AS path information from RADIX. As a result of this, the client is navigated to the appropriate server.

We use the three streaming media, namely RealSystem, Windows Media Technology, QuickTime. We provide the two bit-rate streams, low bit-rate (56kbps) and high bit-rate (300kbps) in order to serve the accesses from the various network environment.

At first, the stream is inputted to the "parent server." Parent server transmits the input stream to the "splitting servers" which allows the access from the streaming clients. These splitting servers serve a huge amount of accesses from the world.

At our webcast event, LIVE! ECLIPSE 2001, our streaming servers produced 1.5Gbps streams at the peak and about 1Gbps streams at LIVE! LEONIDS 2001. We estimate 2Gbps - 4Gbps in total at the peak as the traffic of streaming due to the trend of the broadband age.

This time, we provide the real-time information about the total number of traffic and the total number of clients monitoring at all of our servers. You can know these information on this page during the live webcast.

The load-balancing mechanisms are essential to this sort of high-loaded live streaming services nowadays. We deploy our streaming splitting servers at more than 13 sites including overseas sites. This brings you better streaming quality by controlling the traffic per each site.

As a global load-balancing mechanism, we deploy the streaming navigation technology supported by NTT Smart Connect Corp. This system navigates a client to the closest or a proper server automatically selected on the basis of the source address of the client. This navigation system can dispatch the user request to a proper server because of its server capacity monitoring function.

As a load-balancing mechanism functioning locally in a site, we deploy GCAS (Global Content Aware Switch) technology. GCAS is a service switching solution enabling users to enjoy comfortably content delivery services with media data type varying from a small text to a large streaming media.

ShareCast is a cooperatively distributed system. When a ShareCast client PC starts to receive and play a stream, the client PC relays the stream to the other client PCs. In ShareCast, this process is recursively repeated one after another automatically. As a result, ShareCast makes it possible to deliver the stream to many PCs on a large scale.

ShareCast streams gradually link together the users, and eventually covers the whole of the users dispersing on the Internet. We are waiting for you to join our distributed streaming experiment in LIVE! ECLIPSE 2002 Annular.

Our staff is composed of many operators not only in ENOC but also in the remote sites connected on the Internet.

This cooperative network environment needs real-time communication during the relay. Whenever the situation of the relay changes, we need to cope with the things. Internet technologies, say Mailing lists, IRC, tele-conferencing system are aggressively used for that purpose.

We can say that LIVE! ECLIPSE 2002 Annular is the very project that can be realized on the Internet.

Inmarsat	http://www.inmarsat.com/
Windows Media	http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/
Apache	http://www.apache.org/
Tenbin	http://www.tenbin.org/
RADIX	http://www.toyama.net/~ikuo/radix/
RealSystem	http://www.realnetworks.com/
QuickTime	http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
GCAS	http://www.labs.nec.co.jp/Topics/data/r020306a/ *in Japanese only.
ShareCast	http://www.scast.tv/ *in Japanese only.