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October 2007 | Volume 10 / Number 10
Feature Articles

Overcoming the Challenges in Implementing IPTV Quality of Experience

By Chris Lanfear

IPTV offers great promise to deliver an entirely new paradigm of entertainment and communication that combines all the video and data exchange services from computer and wireless devices with television programming while allowing uninterrupted viewing of the selected channel’s program. However, this new paradigm also brings its own set of design, technology and business challenges. One of the single most important barriers to widespread adoption of IPTV hinges upon a superior Quality of Service (QoS) that delivers maximum Quality of Experience (QoE) for the consumer.

An IPTV initiative, called the IPTV Experience, comprised of Enea, Intel, Kontron and RADVISION, has formed to address these major challenges that could inhibit widespread adoption. This group of leading companies is working to build an infrastructure resource for IPTV deployment that takes advantage of the latest proven processor technology, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, middleware, and video networking to offer powerful solutions to ensure IPTV QoS and ultimately QoE. The IPTV Experience has concentrated on the seven key design challenges that equipment manufacturers and service providers are facing today and has solid, proven and reliable solutions for each.




High Network Processing Capability

One of the first challenges to overcome is the need to deliver the network processing performance and bandwidth necessary for the increasing traffic demands for IPTV-based media content, content storage for video on demand, content protection or Digital Right Management (DRM) network management (OSS) in the network.

IPTV systems have a number of unique requirements including:

• Processor chipsets must be designed for media encoding, decoding and network processing such as content lookup rather than traditional decoding capabilities.

• Home broadband connectivity must provide upload in addition to download capabilities.

• The servers deployed in the infrastructure must be fast and reliable with enough processing power

and bandwidth.

• To support the high bandwidth MPEG 4 codec requirements, a

10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) computing platform is necessary

that offers the flexibility to keep up with the digital processing trends that are advancing at the rate of Moore’s Law as well as

GbE usage value increases based on Metcalfe’s Law.

Multi-core processing technology greatly improves network performance by providing highly efficient movement of data to and from applications, relieving I/O bottlenecks and freeing the CPU for other processing tasks. Combining Intel multi-core technology with ATCA 10 GbE capabilities from Kontron onto a 16-slot ATCA system furnishes telecom equipment manufacturers with dense processing power in a footprint that is smaller than most proprietary solutions. Kontron’s 10GbE ATCA systems also help alleviate bandwidth issues incurred by increasing Triple Play subscriber demands for VoD and live SDTV streams.

Proven Standardized Platforms

IPTV equipment manufacturers must consider a standards driven, commercial approach to reduce costs, lower project risk, accelerate development cycles and create value-added services. A standardized platform will also enable the interoperability crucial for IPTV mass adoption.

RADVISION offers an open standards video conferencing platform to connect people, in real-time, to foster mass adoption of interactive visual communications in the business and consumer markets along with many other viable, revenue-generating value-added services that can be deployed on the IP set-top box foundation.

Intel multi-core architecture offers high-performance platforms in a number of configurations including blade server package, reducing physical space and cooling costs. The result is an improved total cost of ownership for the operator as well as improved network reliability.

Kontron’s AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and MicroTCA-based platforms utilize COTS hardware architecture to provide the building blocks and flexibility needed to build complex IPTV systems.

The Enea Accelerator Platform™ provides equipment manufacturers with an off-the-shelf software foundation for the development of carrier-grade IPTV equipment. These standards-based software components allow rapid development and deployment of IPTV network elements that deliver the needed flexibility and manageability required for high IPTV QoE.

Manageability

Avoiding IPTV downtime is critical, along with the need to manage the network remotely. With more subscribers and increasing service requests, the service provider must be able to seamlessly manage upgrades and service existing equipment. The technology infrastructure must be flexible, adaptable and field-upgradeable.

Kontron’s ATCA platforms enable multicore encoding and transcoding as content engine, network processing, media switching with 10GbE, content storage and Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality. Helping to dramatically shorten downtime and enable remote network management, Kontron has integrated its IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) which provides full visibility of each blade, module and system.

Enea Accelerator Platforms utilize standard ATCA and SA Forum interfaces to offer extended network management services such as dynamic discovery, publish/subscribe, event notification and process monitoring that greatly simplify the partitioning, distribution and management of applications spread across multiple processors and operating systems. The Enea platform also provides fault management, upgrade management and shelf management services that make it easy to monitor, provision, service, upgrade, and fine tune distributed networks.

Scalability

Infrastructure devices in the IPTV network are subject to big performance and scalability challenges, especially if the device maintains per-subscriber connection context. To accommodate the increasing demand of subscribers, the network infrastructure of a service provider will have to support flexibility and scalability.

With the increase of Intel-based multi-core processing capabilities and bandwidth capacities supplied from Kontron COTS hardware architecture, manufacturers can build scaleable system designs faster, ahead of market demands and reduce their product lifecycles nearly in half. Kontron’s AdvancedTCA platform supports network processor technology that is scalable from 1GbE to 10GbE depending on the number of cores.

Central to Enea’s Accelerator Platform is LINX™, an interprocess communications (IPC) framework, for integrating platform components and creating scalable, reusable distributed applications. The platform offers comprehensive networking support along with an integrated suite of tools for developing, deploying, debugging, simulating and upgrading application software.

RADVISION’s Multimedia Terminal Framework allows developers to focus on application development, hardware integration and user interaction rather than complex VoIP standards when developing IP Set Top Boxes, as well as other Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) devices, such as wireline and wireless terminals, IADs, and mobile handsets.

High Reliability and Availability

In an “always on” environment, it is crucial that IPTV systems be extremely available and reliable. Since content must be made available on demand, it is essential that a high availability framework support controlled and managed failover for a seamless, high quality viewing experience for the consumer. Network congestion and video admission control are also key areas of concern.

Yielding an improved total cost of ownership for the operator as well as improving the reliability of the network, Intel’s based multi-core architecture offer high-performance platforms in a number of configurations including blade server package, reducing physical space and cooling costs.

The Enea Accelerator platform is a high availability solution that supports controlled and managed failover resulting in a seamless, high quality viewing experience for the consumer while providing confidence to the IPTV equipment provider

and carrier.

With its 10GbE ATCA platform, Kontron also provides the reliability and availability in its COTS-based computing platform to successfully satisfy the increasing traffic demands for IPTV-based media content and broadband media servers that deliver Video on Demand (VoD) over FFTx and DSL networks.

Interactivity

With emerging next-generation network’s ability to support HD (High Definition) resolutions on decoders, and System-on-Chip (SoC) integrated decoders, the ground is ripe for introduction of full interactive video services based on IPTV and IP set-top-box models that go beyond VoD (Video on Demand) and EPG (Electronic Program Guide). For interactive video conferencing to be successful, VoIP places an additional need on the network for greater upload bandwidth to provide the ability to get high quality video running in both directions.

RADVISION’s Multimedia Terminal Framework provides the signaling and call control layers for manufacturers that enable companies to do voice and video over IP calls from any kind of device. This software can be added to a set-top box so it can be used to access rich information, dial from a web page, access sales people, leverage the wide deployment of IM and presence systems and even supply a Quad Play connection to a mobile device and IMS enabled clients.

Fast Time-to-Market

It is reported that IPTV subscribers worldwide will increase to more than 80 million in 2011. This widespread adoption means that network equipment manufacturers will need to accelerate their development cycles. To do this, a standards driven, commercial COTS approach is necessary.

Enea provides intuitive, well documented application interfaces and examples that accelerate the delivery of new applications and services providing the lowest overall cost of ownership.

Intel’s multi core technology helps accelerate the time-to-market for TEMs and OEMs for the competitive market segments in the communications industry as well as reduce deployment time for IPTV applications. Intel’s communications platforms can dramatically reduce product cycle time while accelerating service deployments.

Offering complete solution framework; encompassing signaling, call control and media management. RADVISION has developed the entire videoconferencing application for Intel’s media processing platform, integrating third party audio and video codecs with the platform’s peripherals, along with a reference application for OEMs.

The current Kontron AdvancedTCA 10GbE portfolio has been designed to support demands for more than 4GbE to the fabric interface within a 10GbE envelope. The three open modular platform elements consist of - the Kontron AT8030 AdvancedTCA processor node featuring three Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and one AdvancedMC slot; the Kontron AT8904 AdvancedTCA 10 GbE Switch with two AdvancedMC slots, and the Kontron AT8404 AdvancedTCA 10 GbE Carrier with four AdvancedMC bays.

Conclusion

To create a superior QoE IPTV solution, multiple elements are necessary to address the challenges of reliable content delivery. Advances in next-generation networks, middleware, processor platforms and processing technologies are now in place to provide the foundation for fully-interactive and networked video, voice and data services to residential and business customers based on IPTV and IP set-top-box (STB) models. For more information, please visit http://www.IPTVexperience.com. IT

John Smolucha is VP of Product Marketing Management at Enea (http://www.enea.com); Sven Fredenfeld is in charge of Business Development, Telecom, at Kontron (http://www.kontron.com); Troy Smith is Program Director, Intel Communications Alliance (http://www.intel.com); and Tsahi Levent-Levi is Products Manager and System Architect at RADVISION (http://www.radvision.com).

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents



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