IPTV T&M CHALLENGES
Nov 1, 2006 12:00 PM, BY JON HAMMARSTROM
The reality of IPTV may be just around the corner for many North American viewers. And hundreds of thousands of viewers in France and Hong Kong already receive broadcast-quality video delivered via IP to their homes.
IPTV is not a revolutionary concept. It is an evolutionary transition of broadcast television that presents some significant challenges despite the marriage of two well-understood technologies — IP and video compression. For service providers, it is an opportunity to gain additional revenue using existing infrastructure and to develop a growth strategy around well-defined technologies and an established service model.
In most cases, IPTV will not be offered as a standalone service, but as part of a triple-play package. The IPTV element of the triple-play market is relatively immature when compared to other transmission infrastructures supporting video (i.e. cable and terrestrial broadcast systems). The focus, therefore, in initial network pilot deployments and during new service rollouts, has been on getting the systems to work.
QoS foundation
IP is now widely deployed for internal distribution in broadcast and network operations facilities. Test and analysis for internal distribution can be distinctly different from that required for IP delivery directly to the home (i.e. IPTV). Test strategies during IPTV initiation, establishment and rollout will vary, but all will be targeted to ensure quality of service.
The organizations involved in IPTV deployments are at varying points along the implementation curve. But in general, those responsible for the system face a three-part problem of design, deployment and management.
In the process of designing components for use in the network and in the home, including set-top boxes, designers and manufacturers must ensure standards compliance and interoperability. There are too many standards, formats and sources of network traffic to leave this to chance or to take shortcuts in the process.
A triple-play network needs to assure availability of network resources and bandwidth to deliver video services. However, overall network bandwidth is finite, and so it is equally important that unnecessary pathways can be torn down successfully. This requires test equipment capable of establishing and testing the IP pathway and providing statistics on network jitter and packet loss.
In the process of new service deployments, the initial concern is getting the system to work. Once the basic network design considerations are met, the next step is looking at what goes in and comes out of the network.
Having established that the IP pathway can be reliably set up, it is then essential that the video data pushed into and received from the pathway is correct. This requires monitoring and analyzing of transport streams (TS) at the output of encoders, multiplexers and headends to ensure the source material is correct.
At the receiver end, similar monitoring and analysis will ensure that there has been no degradation to the video as it passes through the system. Those responsible for installation and commissioning will require video expertise and trusted tools to make the correct compressed video measurements for both multi-program transport stream (MPTS) and single-program transport stream (SPTS) systems.
As initial problems of early deployment are solved and operations scale up for full IPTV system use, the need for system management and test requirements will shift toward networkwide monitoring as part of a large service assurance system. Test strategies and equipment must lead to fast and correct solutions to ensure that the highest quality content is always delivered.
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