IPTV

Introduction

DIPESH ADLAKHA

SDVT

Highlights
Introduction to IPTV & Internet TV
Network Architecture &
Components
Protocols in use
Delivering Broadcast over IP
Delivering Video On Demand
Quality of Experience

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What is IPTV?

Technology that delivers video or TV broadcasts over the IP packet.

Tow-way digital broadcast signal sent through broadband connection
STB software can handle viewer requests to access the available media
sources.
IPTV can be viewed on your conventional TV using a set top box (STB).
Over ADSL/VDSL/Cable/OFC etc.

IPTV is not a protocol itself, but it involves lots of cutting-edge technology

including video and IP.

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What is Internet TV?

Internet TV, in simple terms, is video and audio delivered

over an Internet connection.

You can watch Internet TV on a computer screen, a

television screen (through a set-top box) or a mobile device
like a cell phone.

The difference
IPTV exist in a closed network (limited scope of users).
Internet TV is accessible everywhere, but requires a
subscription.

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What is Revolutionary ?
Provides Interactive TV Programs & Other Entertainment

Live TV Pause, resume and record is possible.

Video (Serials/Movies) on Demand. (Content stored on servers)

Up to 1080p format, High definition DVD quality.

Multiple audio languages

Multiple language subtitles.
On demand advertising (Targeted Ad Insertion)

Interactive applications

Satellite maps
Online shopping, ticket booking etc.

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Network Architecture

Components of IPTV
Media Content

Live TV as well as stored video (Video on Demand)

Analog or digital media source in compression format with technology include MPEG-2, MPEG4, H.264, WMV (Windows Media Video 9 and VC1)

TV Headend

Real-time encoding and transcoding of MPEG-2/4

Rate Shaping, rate converting & IP encapsulating
One ip address per channel

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Components of IPTV contd

VoD Systems

On demand audio/video services

Streaming servers
Time Shift TV(nPVR)
DRM

IPTV Middleware

Software that connects two separate applications.

Integrates VOD & Headend components facilitating auto Provisioning of STB
User management for Channel/package & billing functions
Provieds APIs for OSS
Includes TV Portal / EPG

Broadband IP Network

Also called CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Due to the bandwidth requirements of video, broadband connection are required to distribute high quality video.
IP multicast/unicast, IGMP, RTSP/RTP protocol are needed
End-to-end transmission technology is required.

Receive and Playback (IP-STB)

The playback of IPTV
Decoding the video streaming media.
Two-way communications on an IP network
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IPTV Transmission Types

Live broadcasts(Multicast) Live TV content
Pause and resumefor a fixed
window time
Content is sent to multiple users at
a time.

On-demand videos(Unicast) Arranged like a playlist.

Episodes or clips by
title/categories like news, sports or
music videos.
Choose what you want to watch,
when you want.

KEY PROTOCOLS
HTTP

Request
Middle ware
communication

(hyper-texttransfer-protocol)

Response

play

RTSP
(real time streaming
protocol)

pause

VoD data

record

IGMP
- connecting to multicast stream (TV channel)
- changing from one channel to another

Live TV

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KEY PROTOCOLS contd

Media delivery

Control/Signaling

IP, UDP, RTP, TCP, etc.

RTSP, RTCP, IGMP(v2,v3), SDP

Codecs for video delivery

MPEG2, MPEG4/H.264, MPEG2-TS, FLV, AVI, RM, WMV, ASF, MOV

IGMP

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Multicast Type
One-to-Many

One-Way Multicast
Single Source Multicast (SSM)

One sender
Audio/Video broadcast
Information push
Multicast file transfer

Many-to-Many
Many senders
Audio/video conferences
Distributed computing

Two-Way Multicast
Any Source Multicast(ASM)

Many-to-One

Many senders
Voting / Auctions
Control protocols
Internet Multicast Applications
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Delivering Video On Demand

It is a way to directly get and view the data from the remote
machine without fully downloading it.
In the IPTV environment, the on demand content is delivered
via streaming.
Streaming can be done using HTTP, RTSP (Real Time
Streaming Protocol).
Either TCP or UDP can be used, normally its TCP.
RTP can be used for multimedia delivery.

Streaming / RTSP
RTSP is like a network remote control for multimedia servers
RTSP establishes and controls streams of continuous media
Streaming data is carried out of band (interleaving is possible)

RTSP Methods
Method
DESCRIBE
ANNOUNCE
GET_PARAMETER
OPTIONS
PAUSE
PLAY
RECORD
REDIRECT
SETUP
SET_ PARAMETER
TEARDOWN

Description
Retrieves the description of a presentation
Posts the description of a presentation
Retrieves the value of a parameter
Queries the available methods
Streams delivery is halted temporarily
Starts sending data
Starts receiving data
Informs to connect another server location
Specifies the transport mechanism
Requests to set the value of a parameter
Stops the stream delivery and frees the resources

Slide 16

QoE Quality of Experience

QoE is reliant upon error free delivery of packet data without
retransmission.
Very similar to packet voice where packets are not acknowledged
Customers are much less accepting of poor video quality
Pixelation due to poor transmission

Factors Affecting Service

Encoding and Compression The quality of a transmission can be affected from the source depending on the encoding
technique and level of compression. Generally speaking increased compression leads to a poorer video quality but a
smaller data stream. There is a tradeoff between bandwidth and compression level.

Jitter in IPTV transmission is defined as a short-term variation in the packet arrival time. Jitter is typically caused by network
or server congestion. To help combat jitter, STBs use buffers to smooth out the arrival times of the data packets. I the buffer
overflows or underflows, at the STB, there is often a degradation of the video output.

Limited Bandwidth Bandwidth availability is often an issue that affects the access network or the customers home
network. When traffic utilizes the entire bandwidth, packets are dropped, leading to video quality degradation.

Packet Loss Loss of IP packets may occur for multiple reasons:

bandwidth limitations

network congestion

failed links

transmission errors

Packet loss usually presents a bursty behavior, commonly related to periods of network congestion.

MDI media delivery index

MDI is a standards based video quality metric (RFC-4445)

MDI measures two factors:

Delay Factor

Media Loss Rate

MDI Values increase through network.

Measuring IPTV Quality

Performance Area
IPTV Service Metrics

Metric
QoE

Packet loss

Defined as the number of lost or out-of-order packets

per second. Since many receivers make no attempt to
process out-of-order packets, both are treated as lost
in the MLR calculation. The maximum acceptable
value for MLR is zero, as any packet loss will impact
video quality.

Jitter

Measures the variability of delay in packet arrival times

Latency

Time taken by transport network to deliver video

packets to user
Verify precedence settings are the same for all
components of IPTV transmission
Amount of CPU available and used
Device memory available and used
Quantity used and available
User utilization relative to Committed Information Rate
(CIR)
Queue drops due to congestion

QoS
IPTV System Metrics

Network Metrics

Description
Video quality of experience measured via
Media Delivery Index (MDI), most often displayed as
two numbers separated by a colon: delay factor (DF)
and the media loss rate (MLR)

CPU
Memory
Buffer utilization
CIR utilization
Queue drops

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QUESTIONS ?

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References

http://www.exfo.com/Solutions/FTTx-Access-Networks/FTTN-Networks/IPTV-Technology-Overview/
http://
www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus1000/sw/4_0/layer2/configuration/guide/l2_5igmp_sno
op.pdf
http://
www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst6500/ios/12.2SXF/native/configuration/guide/snooigmp.pdf
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2236.txt

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 BACKUP Slides

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Typical Broadband network

Internet
World

DSLAM

AAA
Radius
Server

DSL CPE
POTS
Splitter

BRAS

Billing
Server

STB

Media
gatewa
y for
VoIP

S
D

Video Head
End

TELCO PSTN NW

VoIP
Network

Multicast Address
Class D IP addresses224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 also referred to as Group
Proxy reporting
Destination Addresses IGMP
(GDA).
snooping with proxy reporting or report suppression actively
filters IGMP packets in order to reduce load on the multicast router.[1]
Joins and leaves heading upstream to the router are filtered so that only
the minimal quantity of information is sent. The switch is trying to
ensure the router only has a single entry for the group, regardless of
how many active listeners there are. If there are two active listeners in a
group and the first one leaves, then the switch determines that the
router
not need
this information since it does not affect the status
corresponds does
to MAC
01-00-5e-14-14-14.
of the group from the router's point of view. However the next time there
corresponds
to MAC
is a routine
query01-00-5e-0a-0a-0a.
from the router the switch will forward the reply from
the remaining host, to prevent the router from believing there are no
active listeners. It follows that in active IGMP snooping, the router will
generally only know about the most recently joined member of the
group.
IGMP querier
In order for IGMP, and thus IGMP snooping, to function, a multicast
router must exist on the network and generate IGMP queries. The tables
created for snooping (holding the member ports for each a multicast
group) are associated with the querier. Without a querier the tables are
not created and snooping will not work. Furthermore IGMP general
queries must be unconditionally forwarded by all switches involved in
IGMP snooping.[1] Some IGMP snooping implementations include full
querier capability. Others are able to proxy and retransmit queries from
the multicast router.

For each GDA there is an associated MAC address. This MAC address is formed by
01-00-5e, followed by the last 23 bits of the GDA translated into hex, as shown below.
239.20.20.20
239.10.10.10

Consequently, this is not a one-to-one mapping, but a one-to-many mapping. From

these two addresses, you can see that the first octet (239) is not used in the MAC
address. So the multicast addresses with the same last three octet but different first
octet have overlapping MAC addresses.
Some Multicast IP addresses are reserved for special use, as shown below.

224.0.0.1 - All multicast-capable hosts.

224.0.0.2 - All multicast-capable routers.
224.0.0.5 and 224.0.0.6 are used by Open Shortest Path First (OSPF).
For IPv6 Multicast addresses, the Ethernet MAC is derived by the four low-order octets OR'ed with
the MAC 33:33:00:00:00:00, so for example the IPv6 address FF02:DEAD:BEEF::1:3 would map
to the Ethernet MAC address 33:33:00:01:00:03

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IGMP snooping

process of listening to Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) network traffic. The
feature allows a network switch to listen in on the IGMP conversation between hosts and
routers. By listening to these conversations the switch maintains a map of which links
need which IP multicast streams. Multicasts may be filtered from the links which do not
need them and thus controls which ports receive specific multicast traffic.

A switch will, by default, flood multicast traffic to all the ports in a broadcast domain (or the
VLAN equivalent). Multicast can cause unnecessary load on host devices by requiring
them to process packets they have not solicited. When purposefully exploited this is
known as one variation of a denial-of-service attack. IGMP snooping is designed to
prevent hosts on a local network from receiving traffic for a multicast group they have not
explicitly joined. It provides switches with a mechanism to prune multicast traffic from links
that do not contain a multicast listener (an IGMP client).
IGMP snooping allows a switch to only forward multicast traffic to the links that have
solicited them. Essentially, IGMP snooping is a layer 2 optimization for the layer 3 IGMP.
IGMP snooping takes place internally on switches and is not a protocol feature. Snooping
is therefore especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as
IPTV.

2006 Adtran, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Proxy reporting

IGMP snooping with proxy reporting or report suppression actively filters IGMP packets in order to
reduce load on the multicast router.[1] Joins and leaves heading upstream to the router are filtered so that
only the minimal quantity of information is sent. The switch is trying to ensure the router only has a single
entry for the group, regardless of how many active listeners there are. If there are two active listeners in a
group and the first one leaves, then the switch determines that the router does not need this information
since it does not affect the status of the group from the router's point of view. However the next time
there is a routine query from the router the switch will forward the reply from the remaining host, to
prevent the router from believing there are no active listeners. It follows that in active IGMP snooping, the
router will generally only know about the most recently joined member of the group.
IGMP querier

In order for IGMP, and thus IGMP snooping, to function, a multicast router must exist on the network and
generate IGMP queries. The tables created for snooping (holding the member ports for each a multicast
group) are associated with the querier. Without a querier the tables are not created and snooping will not
work. Furthermore IGMP general queries must be unconditionally forwarded by all switches involved in
IGMP snooping.[1] Some IGMP snooping implementations include full querier capability. Others are able
to proxy and retransmit queries from the multicast router.

2006 Adtran, Inc. All rights reserved.

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