Multi-Dimensional Video Quality Management

Cable service providers face an increasingly competitive landscape with the growth of video offerings from telcos and satellite service providers. Successful, reliable high quality delivery of thousands of video streams through dozens of network processing nodes in a regional delivery area to hundreds of thousands of subscribers requires an automated quality assurance system. The quality assurance system must correlate per-program impairment events throughout the network to provide an intelligent view of performance data to operations personnel in order to minimize maintenance expenses in detecting, locating, and repairing faults. Today’s modern dynamic and growing physical IP plant deployments along with a growing subscriber base demands nothing less to maintain a provider’s competitiveness.

An efficient, effective operational Quality Assurance system is not optional for a service provider’s modern high volume video over IP network. For most deployed video over IP systems designs, even a single packet loss on a viewed stream results in a customer perceivable impairment. To keep costs in check, an operator must know immediately if transient issues occur, must know where they occur, and must have network visualization tools that allow correlating issues for fault isolation and for cost effective troubleshooting dispatch. Without such tools, the operations staff is reduced to best guesses, random interconnect and device replacement, witch/router configuration and tuning with no way to measure results, and the good will of customers to put up with unsatisfactory video results along the way—a formula for high costs and customer churn.

This paper outlines a major MSO’s regional network distribution architecture and shows how a high volume distributed continuous program monitoring and analysis system provides a new, logical approach to an end-to-end solution for fault detection and isolation while minimizing operational costs.