VSI-E Software Suite

Abstract

As broadband access to high speed research and education networks has become increasingly available to radio telescopes around the world the use of e-VLBI has also increased. High bandwidth e-VLBI experiments have been achieved across wide areas (Whitney et al., 2003). e-VLBI has also been used for the transfer of data from "production" experiments. As the use of e-VLBI becomes more and more prevalent, the need to have some form of standard framework for facilitating interoperability between various acquisition, transport and processing systems around the world is becoming increasingly important. This is the motivation behind the VLBI Standard Interface - Electronic (VSI-E) standard. VSI-E is currently in draft form [\cite{bib-vsie}] and is going through the standards process within the VLBI community. In this poster, we describe an initial reference implementation of the VSI-E protocol. The implementation has been done using the C/C++ language and is in the form of a re-useable library. It has been developed on the Linux platform and can be easily ported to most POSIX-compliant platforms. The reference implementation also includes a high-performance application level transport protocol. That can be used to transport data within the framework of VSI-E.