Center-to-Center Communications in Low-Bandwidth Environments

Center-to-center (C2C) communications provides the capability of exchanging status and control information across centers with disparate systems. Built upon national standards, the Texas implementations provide a C2C infrastructure which allows centers to provide command and control functions to other centers. Participating centers can extract this information, forming a statewide traffic management capability. This report summarizes the research performed to examine the impacts of using the infrastructure in a lowbandwidth environment. Multiple testing scenarios were constructed and examined to determine what, if any, negative impacts would result from center connections over modems. The results clearly show that the amount of data involved in the exchange of most C2C information is not sufficient to stress even low-bandwidth connections. The caveat is the exchange of closed circuit TV (CCTV) snapshots, which may take 2-20 seconds, depending on a number of factors, including size of the snapshot and the modem connection speed.