Market
New production models requires Service Aware Media Networks
Video-over-IP transport has inherent QoS challenges. These challenges are becoming more prominent as the industry landscape rapidly evolves. Broadcasters and media companies are embracing networked production models and tapeless production to significantly reduce operating expenses and streamline automation processes. In addition, with a dramatic increase in Internet video traffic and new premium OTT services, very high-capacity media CDNs are emerging.
This creates huge opportunities for telecom and media operators and they need valid networks to capitalize on emerging media and video opportunities. Opportunities exist in the entire transport network from production and contribution, distribution to delivery and include professional media contribution, tapeless production, cloud broadcasting services as well as premium CDN/OTT delivery networks. And it is not just live video.
More and more non-linear data traffic including video files stored in the IP infrastructure and huge file transport is turning the telecom and media networks into a more IT-based workflow environment. However, these huge data streams are highly real-time sensitive and require a high-quality network with low delay. With each new service and network element added to support media and video networks, the complexity just increases.
These new production models have made the media industry move from simple point-to-point links to larger, feature-rich and resilient networks. At the same time the networks consolidate toward an IP infrastructure and most operators live in the reality of a mixed infrastructure environment, with DWDM and SDH/SONET architectures co-existing with the IP network.
Challenges
This increasing complexity drives demand for improved end-to-end manageability and service monitoring. There are challenges meeting media SLA requirements for service availability, throughput, delay/jitter and packet loss. These problems are found even in well-engineered IP networks and in networks using Forward Error Correction schemes. QoS SLA requirements also place pressure on capacity planning in the core network. Alternatives, such as over provisioning bandwidth helps, but is costly. And while consumer-driven QoS demands increase, there has been no major change in traditional data-centric IP QoS mechanisms in the past few years.
Network manageability, service monitoring, meeting and reporting SLA requirements remain highly complex using data routers for video-over-IP transport.
Using data routers for video-over-IP, network owners place discrete video-over-IP adapters at the network edge, which are typically single service. Using these adapters, the network owner only has control at the edge, they don’t have control inside the network.
Other vendors use data routers for provisioning and control of the media and video services. With data routers, services are managed in classes, creating QoS limitations with the huge increase in high-priority video and media traffic. Because there is no traffic shaping and FEC within the network, only at the ingress, the resulting bursty stream creates a large bandwidth overhead. Using data routers create a level of packet loss for which it is impossible to count on FEC to recover on an end-to-end basis.
Attempting to reduce packet loss with this approach is becoming prohibitively costly and complex. Another downside of this approach is that the media services closely interact with the core IP network creating a requirement for frequent traffic engineering. And when services are managed in classes, versus individually, it creates challenges in QoS delivery.
As the media business is growing and becoming a larger part of the telecom operators business telcos need to reconsider the way the handle media service in an IP/MPLS environment. In order to provide high-qualiity media services and service integrity to its customers telcos need to be serious about its media business and create reliable media service networks, using the IP core for connectivity. Telcos are already doing this with other services such as broadband, mobile and enterprise.
Since the media service need to be handled on-demand on an hour-to-hour basis it is important to manage media service independently for the IP core network. The benefit of this that you can provide a true media service aware network as well as enhance the Quality of Service and the performance of the IP network.
Net Insight Solution
Net Insight’s approach to Service Aware Media Networks is unique in that it has the ability to look at each media service individually within the IP network. This capability means that Net Insight can provision, monitor and protect each service individually on demand on an end-to-end basis. – making the network media service aware. We call this capability Service-Centric Network Management.
In addition, Net Insight is the only vendor that can deliver 100 per cent Quality of Service (QoS) for media-rich network traffic. The company accomplishes this in two ways. Net Insight’s Nimbra Media Service Routers (MSRs) enhance the quality of the IP network traffic with QoS Enhanced Links and ensures zero packet loss with Lossless Routing.
With QoS Enhanced Links, Net Insight’s MSR, the Nimbra, takes action at each hop to enhance the underlying infrastructure by improving the quality of the traffic that is between each Nimbra as it travels on the core IP network. It performs forward error correction (FEC) to reduce packet loss created between any Nimbra MSRs, traffic shaping to facilitate resource allocation and SLA ensurance for the IP core network and resynchronization to reduce end-to-end jitter and wander.
Using data routers as MSRs FEC is performed only at the network end-points, not per link within the media network. By performing FEC between MSRs instead of on the accumulated loss between end-points, the Nimbra network can correct and handle more packet loss. In addition, FEC can optimize performance by engineering per link for the specific needs depending on individual link quality. This approach means latency can be significantly reduced for a specific service end-to-end. Also in contrast to the data-centric approach, Net Insight shapes an aggregated, constant stream out of the Nimbra MSR to avoid bursty input to the IP core, thus ensuring its QoS SLAs.
Because the Nimbra measures packet loss and jitter in real-time and on all intermediate links, it measures the health of the underlying network. This capability allows SLA reporting per link, visibility that is not possible using classical data routers as MSRs.
In contrast to using data routers in media networks, Net Insights MSR/Nimbra performs Lossless Routing. From ingress port to egress port, the Nimbra never loses a packet as traffic moves through a Nimbra MSR, thus never adding any QoS degradation to the media services. This is ensured by performing resource allocation per service and by Net Insight’s unique time synchronization.
Key Benefits
Net Insight’s approach to the QoS challenges is to offer specially designed MSRs for media traffic over IP networks, improving the performance of the IP infrastructure through unique capabilities such as QoS Enhanced Links and Lossless routing. Having a service-centric approach to media networks through Service-Centric Network Management gives networks owners a truly service aware media network with support for improved SLA reporting without interfering or affecting the provisioning and protection of the underlying IP core infrastructure. In summary, Net Insight’s suite of MSRs – the Nimbra products improve the QoS over IP networks ensuring 100% QoS and service integrity.