Market
New demanding media transport service a new approach for telecom operators - Service Aware Media Networks
The market drive with a booming demand for HD, 3D, live events, OTT and digitalization of TV increases the amount of video traffic in the operators network. Many of the media services also shifts from linear services to cloud computing services with demand on low-latency interactivity and high bandwidth file transfers. High bandwidth CDNs co-locating media content closer to the consumer is another natural development as content distribution shift towards OTT from linear TV. The trends in new ways of producing and distributing media content open up business opportunities for innovative operators. The evolution of media services happens at the same time as all operators are consolidates all services into one IP and MPLS based infrastructure.
These two trends together put new challenges the network technology and operators organizations. Because of this new media landscape, operators reorganize and introduce media departments responsible for consumer and enterprise video services. The shift towards media also forces the operators to investigate and introduce new technologies to address the challenges of high bandwidth services with strict QoS requirements. The IP and MPLS technology as of today is not designed to address the requirements from media services as they primarily are designed for broadband consumers services and enterprise VPN services.
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, state of the art IP networks. 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 media transport.
One approach to implement video-over-IP is for network owners to place discrete video-over-IP adapters at the network edge, which are typically single service, and to use the data routers to connect them. Using these adapters, the network owner only has control at the edge, they don’t have control inside the network.
Other equipment vendors promote 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 and manageability.
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-quality media services and service integrity to its customers telcos need to be serious about its media service business and create reliable media service networks, using the IP core for connectivity and use equipment optimized for media services to handle per service management, monitoring and QoS control. This approach is similar to how mobile and broadband services are implemented at telcos with the core network as transport and equipment such as BRASes and DSLAMs to handles service specific functionality.
Since the media services need to be handled on-demand on an hour-to-hour basis and that the configuration is a request from the customer to the media service group, it is beneficial that these configurations is handled separately and independently for the IP core network by the media service group and their IP core network groups longer planning perspective. The separation also offers a better way of attending the media customers which are used to have on-demand services.
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 which allows the the media business unit to attend the media customers demand directly and also have full control of their individual services.
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 Nimbra MSR takes action at each hop to enhance transport of 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 the core. In addition, dimensioning of the FEC can be optimized per link depending on individual link quality. This approach rsults in that 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 improving the QoS for lower priority traffic which suffers from high priority, bursty traffic thus improving the over all QoS and network utilization.
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 Nimbra MSR key benefits:
- The Nimbra MSR has unique capabilities to resolve problems in the underlying IP/MPLS transport network by its QoS Enhanced Links which recovers from packet loss using FEC and reshapes incoming traffic to reduce the stress on the core network.
- In the forwarding of traffic the Nimbra MSR offers Lossless routing thereby avoiding packet loss obtaining perfect transport for video services for contribution and distribution.
- The Nimbra MSR's unique per service handling, including provisioning, per service protection levels, etc., offers the operator or the media service group within the operator perfect control over their services offered internally and to other media customers. This allows operators to offer advanced media services with full control and customer attention.
- The Nimbra MSR's built in real-time monitoring system offer per service control to ensure and verify customer SLAs and also superb trouble shooting capabilities.
In summary, Net Insight’s suite of MSRs – the Nimbra products improve the QoS over IP networks ensuring 100% QoS and service integrity.