Multi-layer Quality Monitoring for IPTV services

for IPTV Providers

 

NETvisor's iTVSense solution enables performance and quality monitoring of IPTV core  systems, transmission networks, and CPE devices. Measuring key parameters at the customer endpoint and at network distribution points enables high-level, proactive network management resulting in quick error detection and localization.

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Benefits

• Comprehensive management for the entire IPTV infrastructure
• Robust and scalable distributed monitoring platform
• Mult-layer analysis of both multicast TV and Video On Demand streams
• Real-Time status Dashboard and long-term measurement collection for trends analysis
• Built on open standards, easy to extend and integrate 

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Measurements performed by iTVSense

 

IPTV Signal transport: End-to-end signal transport characteristics at both UDP (IP packet) and MPEG2/4 stream levels, IP Multicast join delay and channel zapping time, IPTV Middleware and VoD service response times

 

Central (Headend) infrastructure: Availability and performance data of receivers, encoders, IPTV servers, VCAS, VoD, Middleware systems

 

CPE devices (supported STB-s and CPE probes): availability, CPU, memory etc. resource usage, network traffic, uptime and reboots

 

Provider network: The iTVSense system can be extended to monitor network devices, such as routers, switches, DSLAMs, BRASes, various servers etc., thus providing end-to-end monitoring for the entire provider network.

 

iTVSense architecture

 

 

Components of the distributed monitoring system are as follows:

 

The iTVSense Central Manager (CM) is a customized instance of NETvisor's PVSR performance management suite. This component provides most of the manager's functionality including data acquisition and analysis, persistent data storage, configuration for the entire monitoring system. The iTVsense web-based graphical user interface is also part of the central manager.

 

iTVSense Probes, deployed in strategic locations across the network, join he multicast streams and monitor up to 80-100 IPTV channels simultaneously, as well as designated VoD transmissions. They provide UDP and Transport Stream level analysis data, and compute the aggregate quality metric, RFC 4445 Media Delivery Index (MDI).

 

iTVSense STB Agents are small-footprint software modules deployed on the customer set-top-boxes. They provide the same signal quality measurements as those of IPTV Probes, but obviously for a single multicast or VoD stream only, the one actually being viewed by the customer. In addition, various STB system health parameters are also reported (e.g. system and CPU load, available memory, uptime etc.).

The STB agent can be compiled and used with most Linux-based STB implementations.

 

iTVSense CPE probes are scaled-down, simple, customer-installable 2-channel versions of the iTVsense probes that allow for monitoring the IPTV streams at the customer end of the network. They can be used for CPE-side monitoring where the STB type is not supported by our iTVsense Agent. Another application for these devices is customer loop testing prior to the provisioning of IPTV service. The CPE Probe can be remotely controlled to receive and analyze IPTV and VoD channels, without a STB being present.

 

iTVSense SLA Suite is an additional software component typically deployed on the central manager. This module can be used to define SLA metrics, display data on SLA various dashboards (operator, manager, executive) and generate SLA reports.  The reports and computation algorithms are highly customizable, and the SLA Suite is able to receive performance data not only from the iTVsense CM, but from third-party Network Management Systems as well.