Rivulet Communications speeds real-time traffic

A group of former Tellabs executives is running Rivulet Communications, a maker of network hardware that improves the performance of the highest priority class of service set by routers.

The company has appointed Ed Kennedy to be the new CEO, taking over from founder Steven Rogers who remains the CTO.

The rest of the management team, including Kennedy, has worked for Tellebs and in most cases also with Ocular Networks, which Kennedy helped found.

The company has also moved its headquarters from Portsmouth, N.H., to Herndon, Va. Its customer service and research teams remain in New Hampshire.

Rivulet’s Dynamic Synchronization Technology (DST) software is loaded on network appliances that sit at network access points where devices generating high-priority traffic connect.

The traffic is marked with ToS bits for top priority on the network. The Rivulet DST appliances gate traffic onto the network and synchronize it to minimize collisions as it reaches routers.

So if a network has four sources of video traffic, Rivulet devices placed where they tie in to the network coordinate with each other to release packets in such a way that they face minimal delays when they pass through the top-priority queues in routers.

Without the DST appliances, the traffic would still receive top priority but would run a greater statistical risk of facing congestion at routers where delay or dropped packets could degrade the video, the company says.

The company says it sells its gear to medical facilities, government agencies, military and service providers as a means to improve the quality of real-time applications.

Last March the company tapped $20 million in venture financing from ATA Ventures, Performance Equity Management, Scorpion Capital Partners and Menlo Ventures. That follows on $15 million from the year before.