Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1255991
July/August/September 2020 I 11 FIGURE 4: Diagram of unicast transmission. 192.168.11.114 192.168.11.117 192.168.11.118 192.168.11.121 192.168.11.116 192.168.11.115 Switch Fabric No matter which of the network segregation methods is chosen, the switch fabric's non-blocking bandwidth specification is a key consideration. The network switches must have enough switch fabric bandwidth to support full non-blocking bidirectional gigabit bandwidth on all ports simultaneously. Information technology and AV administrators need to be mindful that when working with network switches that have downlink ports in the switch (i.e., ports that are connected to AV over IP encod- ers and decoders), physical line bandwidth may specify 1 GbE ports. However, the switch capacity to handle IP traffic (i.e., the actual bit and bytes of data) is lower than total downlink ports multiplied by connected active 1 GbE AVoIP devices. This creates a blocking architecture. Another consideration is the supported uplink band- width (i.e., from network switch to other network switch). Typical network switches are interconnected using dedi- cated or trunk ports with typical bandwidth between 10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s. To ensure proper network operation, it is recommended to calculate how many simultaneous AVoIP streams will pass the trunk port. For example, if the maximum bit rate of a given network trunk port is limited to 10 Gb/s, approximately 10 AVoIP streams of 1 Gb/s can pass the trunk port to the other switch. In the same scenario, if AVoIP that requires 10 Gb/s is used, the system will be able to move only one stream between the network switches, resulting in scalability and network bottleneck issues. Network Protocols IP networks are run and operated by protocols. Different protocols are applied to discover routing paths, move data, manage security, and many various applications and services. Therefore, it is important to understand the various types of data transmission: Unicast—A unicast transmission means one host to a single host (Figure 4). If a packet has a specific designation address that is unique to one host, the transmission is unicast.