The need for live monitoring for IPTV deployments

By Kaynam Hedayat, Senior Director of Product Development, EXFO Service Assurance

Rolling out IPTV is an expensive and extremely complex proposition. Broadcast and on-demand video services are new territory for telecommunications service providers, and there are a number of technical challenges involved, including building a new service delivery network that can handle the increased bandwidth needs of IPTV, re-engineering the core network to support video services, and adding new technologies for video content management, distribution, and billing.

With the amount of infrastructure upgrades required, these IPTV initiatives are costing major providers billions of dollars (e.g. AT&T has publicly discussed plans to spend $4.6 billion to deploy IPTV service to 19 million homes in 40 new markets by the end of 2008).

On top of the technical challenges and investments, customer’s quality expectations are elevated because of their experiences with existing television services from cable and satellite providers. Not only do the new IPTV offerings need to be compelling enough to lure customers away from their existing television providers, but also providers must roll out IPTV services that meet user expectations or risk losing the customer for their IPTV and other bundled services business.

With so much being invested in IPTV infrastructure and content, and the extremely high customer acquisition costs associated with luring customers away from existing providers, telecommunications service providers need to deploy a quality IPTV offering in order to compete. IPTV promises to be a very lucrative service for telcos, but it must be reliable, customisable, flexible, live up to its hype, and ultimately drive new customer acquisitions and additional revenue opportunities.

Monitoring live IPTV service ensures success

The highly performance-sensitive nature of a service like IPTV means that service providers must assure the end-to-end quality of this service as well as the video programming content (broadcast and Video On Demand), starting at the Head End and continuing throughout the service delivery network, all the way down to their subscribers’ set-top boxes (STBs). A comprehensive IPTV service assurance solution requires segmenting the IPTV delivery network and distributing service assurance appliance throughout the network, enabling providers to monitor and analyse the impact of the transport network and video stream manipulation processes as content traverses the network, in real time.

A distributed service assurance architecture allows constant monitoring of live IPTV programming, providing in-network visibility into end-to-end video quality. This is extremely important as providers strive to offer high-quality IPTV services, providing the service intelligence to ensure video quality, meet service level agreements (SLAs), and meet subscribers’ quality of experience (QoE) expectations. As an attractive component of service providers’ bundled service offerings, providers must continually assure the performance and quality of their IPTV services to build a loyal customers base, increase subscriber up-take rates, and significantly reduce churn.

Continually assuring quality

As IPTV services are deployed, providers need a service assurance solution that will continually test and monitor the performance of their IPTV service to proactively assure a quality customer experience. A solution delivering complete visibility into service quality and performance allows providers to easily establish performance metrics, warning thresholds, desired test configurations, and test schedules to ensure they are meeting quality standards on an ongoing basis.

When problems are identified, an effective service assurance solution provides actionable information to quickly determine the root-cause and isolate problems – saving costly diagnostic and repair times. Knowing exactly where a problem is occurring (IP/MPLS core, distribution network, or at the home) can significantly reduce the impact on support staff, decrease the need for expensive truck rolls, and solve problems in a timely manner to minimise effects on the customer. Service assurance systems that provide this information typically deliver a return on investment (ROI) in less than three months.

Service assurance throughout the IPTV lifecycle enables providers to successfully introduce and manage IPTV services faster and more cost-effectively, while continually assuring the highest service quality.

Components of IPTV service assurance

When investigating IPTV service assurance solutions, it is integral that the solution provides complete, end-to-end service visibility across the infrastructure. The complexity of the infrastructure and the dynamic nature of video content create many potential points of failure that can have a detrimental impact on the customer experience. Traditional operational support systems (OSS) and network management systems (NMS) can’t provide the required end-to-end visibility and don’t monitor live traffic and services effectively.

The ideal IPTV service assurance solution should offer visibility into the quality of the underlying transmission infrastructure, video content, and the overall customer experience – the three most important components of the IPTV network. By constantly monitoring network and service performance, telecommunications providers can identify IP transmission issues versus video quality impairments, check video quality with end-to-end service visibility, and proactively manage the overall experience of its valued subscribers.

In order to effectively measure and monitor the end-to-end performance of an IPTV service, there are three critical areas that need to be addressed: infrastructure quality, content quality, and customer quality.

Infrastructure quality

A key element of assuring IPTV service quality is providing understanding and visibility into how the network behaves when IP video streams are carried over it. An effective live monitoring solution allows service providers to instantly identify whether infrastructure impairments exist in their national, regional, or local content aggregation and distribution locations, and allow them to resolve these issues before service quality is compromised. Additionally, service assurance lets providers:

- Evaluate the quality and performance of the multicast distribution layer
- Correlate key performance indicators (KPIs), such as jitter, latency, and frame loss, with the overall user experience
- Segment the network to quickly pinpoint network problems
- Simulate user-initiated channel changes

Content quality

Poor video content, resulting from blurring, tiling, and dropout effects, is unacceptable if providers want to attract and retain customers. Adding to the challenge, video quality over IP networks can change in mere seconds. With automated, continuous testing of video quality and passive monitoring of live video streams, an effective IPTV service assurance solution ensures the consistent delivery of quality video content across the network and to subscribers. With an IPTV service assurance solution, providers can:

- Automate testing of true video streams in real time
- Produce video quality measurement scores
- Analywe live video sessions

Customer experience quality

Ensuring the customers’ QoE is vital to the success of any IPTV service. Without service assurance providing visibility to the customer experience, providers don’t have the necessary insight to proactively ensure that customers’ expectations are being met. A service assurance solution continually measures channel change response times as well as video function delays – providing essential usage statistics that providers need to assure quality IPTV experiences for their customers. A comprehensive service assurance solution allows providers to:

- Monitor channel availability and channel change performance
- Provide visibility into the subscriber experience and usage statistics
- Test simulated channels by emulating set top boxes for zap and VoD function delays

Video quality measurement algorithms

Video quality measurement has introduced a number of challenges to those in charge of IPTV quality, such as a quality dependence on the endpoint rendering the video, the complexity of the video coding algorithms, the multitude of different applications, and the different transport technologies that are used by broadcast and on-demand video applications. It’s critical for IPTV service providers to continually measure video quality that accurately reflect a customer’s experience.

Methods of video quality measurement fall into three categories: payload-based, codec-aware packet-based, and codec-independent packet-based algorithms. Full reference payload-based algorithms provide deep video content analysis capabilities, and packet-based algorithms score video quality through network KPIs.

(Example of packet loss on QoE)

There are a number of vendors offering algorithms, but no standards currently exist. The ultimate goal is to provide a video quality score that is as close to the user’s QoE as possible

Putting it all together

Having visibility into infrastructure, content, and customer quality of experience is the foundation for managing the performance of your service. Next is effective use of this information through data analysis, aggregation, and correlation of information to provide rich, end-to-end service-centric quality reports and dashboards for different users and audiences. Analytics engines with the knowledge of the service offering provide advanced, real-time and historical reports for applications ranging from trouble-shooting to business intelligence. The key differentiator of the next-generation analytics engines is visibility into true end-to-end QoE while providing service-centric information that enables companies to run their business based on service quality versus network quality.

The way to win: assure the bundle

Because IPTV typically shares the converged network, telecommunications providers also need to test, measure, and assess the performance of other IP-based services – such as voice, data, and mobile – as well as the infrastructure supporting these converged networks (IP/MPLS core). A provider’s best choice is a converged service assurance solution that delivers the information required to effectively assure any IP-based services, over any network, to any endpoint.

A comprehensive converged service assurance solution allow providers to:

Continuous delivery of high-quality services is absolutely critical to the success of telecommunications providers, as they must assure the bundle to survive and thrive in today’s ultra-competitive landscape. Only by proactively monitoring service quality and network performance in real time will providers be able to consistently meet customer expectations and achieve business success by adding new subscribers, building loyalty, and reducing churn. With very high customer expectations, IPTV services change everything. Providers must be prepared and take a proactive approach to service assurance in order to achieve success.

###

About the author:

Kaynam Hedayat, Snr. Director of Product Development & Strategy, is responsible for defining and driving the strategic technology direction of the firm, the company's various product management and product marketing initiatives, and representing EXFO on relevant standards bodies. He earned a Master's of Engineering degree from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University.