Xbox 360 Fall Update Includes LLTD

There has been a lot of buzz about the recent fall update for the Xbox 360; however, an important new feature which has not been mentioned is support for the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) protocol. In its basic form, LLTD allows a Windows Vista PC to accurately map the topology of your home network. In short, this map is a rich diagnostic tool designed to be a visual replacement for command-line ping (and I suppose arp). LLTD Mapper (component which initiates probes and draws the map) heuristics are able to ascertain what types of network elements (which may or may not implement the LLTD Responder) are interconnecting PC/devices that implement the LLTD Responder (component which responds to probe requests). If a PC/device implements the Responder, rich information such as: custom icon, IPv4/IPv6 address, MAC address, configuration URL, etc. is visible within the map. Below is a map of my home network, which now shows the Xbox 360!

The LLTD Responder component will be available for Windows XP some time in the near future so XP machines will also show up in the Vista map. There is a great deal of improvement that can go into the network map; and folks within networking are actively planning for these improvements. So what about QoS you ask? As Mathias previously mentioned, qWAVE APIs require that the destination host support LLTD to do real-time bandwidth estimation, etc. So, in addition to enabling a visual map of your home network, LLTD enables a device to support adaptive AV streaming via qWAVE support. Media Center on Vista is a great example of a qWAVE enabled application that does real-time adaptive streaming to the Xbox 360 (and other Pika devices) that support LLTD.

What would you like to see the network map support?

-- Gabe Frost

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2006
  I'd love to see the network map support.

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2007
  As Gabe mentioned in his blog post titled “ Xbox 360 Fall Update Includes LLTD ,” the Xbox 360 now includes

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2008
  You are saying that "LLTD enables a device to support adaptive AV streaming via qWAVE support", I wanted to know how, because of what I have seen of qWave all the intelligence is in the Vista PC, and so is all the inormation about the network condition, so how can a device be aware of these information that qWave has. Let's take an example, to be clearer. If I have a network storage device which has the LLTD Responder and a Vista PC connected with wireless, can I stream from my network storage device with QoS, using qWave? Or is qWave utilisation meant only to have the PC act as a source? And if it is the case what do you mean by: "Media Center on Vista is a great example of a qWAVE enabled application that does real-time adaptive streaming to the Xbox 360 (and other Pika devices) that support LLTD." Can you explain how it is doing that? How does the XBox interact with the Media Center to enable streaming with QoS? Thanks