As Telecom operators deploy IPTV and Video on Demand (VoD) services, they are competing with established, high-quality Satellite, Cable and broadcast TV services. In this market, consumers' quality expectation levels have been set high; they are used to near-perfect picture quality and uninterrupted availability. To succeed against these established home entertainment services, an IPTV service must provide similar levels of picture quality and service availability. Plus, it will need to provide exceptional consumer benefits - such as, extreme user personalization and compelling interactivity - whilst building on the operator's all IP network to deliver converged entertainment and communication services. Although the IPTV platform enables innovative new services that provide an exciting revenue opportunity, it also brings serious infrastructure implications 

IPTV and VoD consume huge amounts of bandwidth in access, aggregation and core networks, and TV content is no longer constrained to a limited provider-programmed broadcast model. Whilst IPTV channels are generally multicast to the user base, users can access time-shifted content and vast libraries of on-demand content using individual unicast streams - significantly adding to the network load. However, this is not where it ends; with further interactive and personalized services such as targeted advertising, screen-in-screen views, customized Electronic Program Guides, on-screen messaging, etc. growing as the TV becomes more of a multimedia hub for all types of IP application. All of these likely service extensions will impact the network in different ways. As there is little experience in the consumer adoption and network impact of any of these new services, inflexible interim solutions for IPTV quality enhancement, such as partitioning the network and applying basic call-counting techniques, will become increasing difficult to plan, deploy and manage. They will ultimately limit the service innovation that the subscriber base will demand.

Through the use of Operax Dynamic Resource and Admission Control solutions a complex service ecosystem can be guaranteed with end-to-end Quality of Service, whilst ensuring that the network remains agile to new service innovation

Operax standards-based Resource and Admission Control products enable end-to-end, per session QoS guarantees for IPTV services in IP networks. These will support your portfolio of IPTV, and all other IP services today, and in the future - in today's pre-IMS networks and the migration to IMS architectures. This is achieved through the implementation of policy-based resource and admission control that separates applications from transport network resources (and vice versa).

This provides the following advantages to IPTV and multi-service environments:

Common Interface to network

Operax exposes a logical single control point of contact for applications to request bandwidth and enforce subscriber and service policies on a real-time, per session basis. This prevents the IPTV application from needing to understand the underlying topology of the network, and sets in place an architecture which can be reused by each new service that is launched by the operator.

Multi-service Solution

Whilst it is possible to implement application-specific admission control solutions, these are only aware of the application that they manage and are not network topology aware. This leads the network to be logically segmented into separate networks for VoIP, IPTV and VoD, etc. Evidence from operators suggests that there is a 15% operational saving in managing the transport network for each partition that is removed. Operax views the network as one common all-IP resource which is available to all applications. It then manages how the services are allocated bandwidth within that pool using network policy rules and the actual enforcement of subscriber and service policies.

Network Topology Aware

Operax Resource Controllers are network topology aware, which enables path-sensitive admission control. The relevant sub-set of network resource contention points for each individual session are identified and considered in the admission control process. This includes the number and type of sessions delivered to the subscriber to ensure available bandwidth in the access, aggregation and core networks is not exceeded.

Priority Service Aware

Operax Resource and Admission solutions manage different service partitions and priorities within an overall service type. For example in IPTV and VoD there may be a national emergency service group which takes priority over all TV channels. This can be prioritized over normal IPTV and VoD traffic. In a multi-service example emergency calls take priority over normal telephony sessions.

Dynamic Policy Enforcement

In multi-service networks it is important to enforce policy to make sure that users do not exceed bandwidth or quality parameters that they have been allocated (by changing their Type of Service bit setting for example). Whilst IPTV and VoD are effectively a closed system they can be impacted by other traffic behaving in this way. Operax supports multiple types of policy enforcement points from multiple vendors allowing the operator to manage enforcement from one common platform at a network level.

Standards Compliant

Operax Resource Controllers are compliant to the ETSI TISPAN RACS, ITU-T RACF, and 3GPP IMS (PDF) standards architectures for policy-based resource and admission control.

For more information on Operax IPTV solutions please download the pdf under Product Literature.