Broadband Network Systems

With experienced staff, well established partnerships and a proven track record of project delivery excellence, BNS is ideally placed to design and implement IPTV solutions that are efficient to build, easy to maintain and profitable to run. Find out more about the BNS Service Offering.

Five Cornerstones of Network Performance Excellence

With the advancement of IP broadband access technologies, carrying video streams on different broadband platforms has increasingly become a viable option for service deployment.

An Internet Protocol (IP) Broadband TV service has many advantages compared to other TV services, such as Cable TV. IP's inherent full interactivity enables a wide and unique variety of services and applications to be launched over this platform, such as interactive applications (e.g. video blog), transactional applications (e.g. TV shopping) and data-casting (e.g. weather information).

However, the technological requirements and considerations for IP IPTV are different to conventional TV services. The assessment of existing network elements and the choice of network architecture is a crucial part of a IPTV service deployment as a large number of video streaming devices and servers have to be deployed to support the operation of the IP Broadband TV headend. (Please refer to the BNS Whitepaper Distributed Architecture vs. Centralized Architecture for IP Video-on-Demand)

The 5 Cornerstones of Network Performance Excellence

When assessing the suitability of upgrading existing IP networks to video services, operators should check their network against the following parameters for network performance excellence:

Scalability
Security
Manageability
QoS
Availability

Scalability: Ensuring Maximum Scalability for Future Growth

The scalability of an IPTV network is an important aspect of network design in order to achieve economies of scale moving forward.

Operators who are starting out to deploy a IPTV service should begin by building a small IPTV system and scale it alongside the growth of the business. The components adopted in the IPTV service architecture should be based on a building block model where all components are able to operate within a small system as well as a large system. This applies to both centralised and distributed IPTV components.

Manageability: Maximising Performance Management

IPTV service components are commonly made up of equipment from different manufacturers which usually implement functionalities differently. This is why the role of systems integration is extremely important for a smooth launch and quick growth of a IPTV service.

In order to achieve a flawless service offering, the IPTV Management System (Middleware) has to be capable of interacting with all entities in the system. A robust IPTV management solution should have the capabilities to manage distributed video servers for Real Video-on-Demand (RVOD) services and also be able to manage tens of thousands of Set-top-boxes (STB).

Availability: Fast Network and System Recovery is Essential for Quality Performance

Just like other TV services, high availability is key for a viable IPTV service. In case of breakdowns, network and video service equipment must be able to recover as quickly as possible to minimise the effects on subscribers. A good redundancy scheme can help to ensure a non-interrupted failover and thus seamless service delivery. For example, if a video server breaks down during a subscriber’s Video-on-Demand (VOD) session, the redundant video server should take over the VOD session instantly, ensuring that the failover is not interrupting the subscriber’s viewing experience.

Security: Protecting Your Mission-Critical Video Services

Protecting the IPTV system is just as important as protecting the network equipment and computer servers against any security attacks, whether unintentional or malicious.

A IPTV system is susceptible to common security attacks such as IP Spoofing, Denial of Service (DoS), including UDP and TCP types, false authentication, unauthorized access and packet sniffing. Operators should identify all sources of security risks and analyse hardware and software capabilities of the network system in order to tackle them. Most attacks can be prevented by the inherent security features of the network transport devices, however violations such as packet sniffing of video streams can only be defended by specialist content security, conditional access (CA) and digital rights management (DRM) systems.

Additionally, for transactional services such as web-based TV shopping, the security socket layer (SSL) feature built into the web browser in the set-top-box provides extra security to customers.

Quality of Service (QoS) Parameters

The QoS prioritisation for IPTV is guided by the following three parameters:

Sufficient bandwidth is guaranteed for the streaming video;
No video packet is dropped while travelling from source to destination;
The video packets of the application are delivered in a timely manner, meeting jitter and latency requirements. The Program Clock Reference (PCR) information carried in the MPEG-2 transport stream (TS) is the fundamental parameter for feasible decoding. Excessive jitter in the network will impact IPTV service quality;

While QoS is often handled by network layer transport devices, assigning the correct priority level in the IP packet header is the responsibility of the sending ends including IP streamers, video servers and STBs. Maintaining QoS at the subscriber level is also important as most IPTV subscribers are sharing a single broadband connection for their IPTV service and broadband internet service.

HDTV: Making Your Network Future Proof

There is no doubt that High Definition TV (HDTV) will become the TV standard of the future. While there is a high bandwidth requirement for transmitting HD MPEG-2 TS video streams, at around 15Mbps - 50Mbps, it is practically impossible to transport HD MPEG-2 TS on most broadband access technologies available today.

MPEG-4/H.264 is key to transmitting the HD H.264 TS video at rates as low as around 5.0Mbps. Nevertheless, H.264 can also greatly reduce the bandwidth requirements for Standard Definition Transport (SDTV), at around 1.5Mbps.

Despite all of its advantages, there are currently three key factors slowing the full adoption of H.264:

technology optimization
maturity of critical mass manufacturing and
competition from existing MPEG-2 systems (as MPEG-2 is still the most common compressed form of video in content distribution and contribution today).

Nevertheless, the fact is that MPEG-2 content contribution is being replaced by H.264 gradually. On the content distribution side, service providers deploying a new service are now considering H.264 as the video codec to start with, and existing MPEG-2 IPTV service providers are also considering deploying H.264 for HDTV services.

Is my Network Ready?

Contact BNS to find out...

	BNS White Paper
	Distributed vs Centralised Architecture for IP VOD.
	>> more...

	BNS Technology Integration Fact sheet
	Download the PDF
	>> more...

	BNS IP Set Top Box Solutions

	PH300 - Field Proven, Low-Cost MPEG-2
	>> more...

	BP-801- Versatile, Upgradeable MPEG-2/4
	>> more...

	Technology Application Examples
	In-Seat IP-TV Satellite Entertainment System
	>> more...
	Triple Play over ADSL
	>> more...

	The BNS Technology Team

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