Testing Cisco's IPTV Infrastructure

This report documents the results of a Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) IPTV infrastructure test. Back in 2006, Light Reading commissioned the European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) to conduct an independent test of a complete end-to-end solution for service providers focusing on video services.

The test was groundbreaking in several ways. We verified an end-to-end IPTV and triple-play solution focusing on the network service requirements of broadcast TV and video-on-demand (VOD) applications.

EANTC asked Cisco to design a network for up to 1 million customers and to provide a full POP, backbone, and service-area infrastructure for the test, serving 60,000 emulated users. The test was based on a mock RFP (request for proposal) detailing requirements for a fictional, but realistic, service provider triple-play network. Cisco’s ability to propose a suitable network design was part of the test exercise.

Our test covered four main areas:

1. Massive scaleability of broadcast TV and VOD services
2. QOS (quality of service) in an integrated business and residential customer network with real-time video, voice, and data service
3. High availability with sub-second failover time for all of the services
4. User experience for video services under high network load and packet loss on the first mile

• Sustained zero packet loss operation serving 60,000 triple-play customers with 20 high-definition and 200 standard-definition video channels, 22-Gbit/s VOD traffic, and additional Internet traffic
• Zero loss 1:60 replication of multicast traffic at 99 percent load
• Out-of-service times under node and link failure situations of less than 70 ms for any unicast service and less than one second for the multicast service
• Correct QOS implementation even under full load with 70 percent real-time traffic in the low latency queue
• Substantial improvements of video service performance with Cisco's unique call admission control (CAC) for unicast and multicast services; we verified that CAC prevented oversubscription in the network by too many video viewers
• Outstanding video quality experience with up to 10 percent packet loss on the last mile when Cisco’s proprietary set-top box enhancements re-requesting missing packets from a network buffer server (VQE) were implemented

It was a tremendous effort – but well worth it: IPTV infrastructure is clearly very complex and requires a different, more holistic focus in implementation and testing than past broadband access solutions. It seemed a simple exercise in the beginning: Take standard Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) capabilities, stir in some aggregation hardware with lots of queues, add multicast, and away you go. But what we found is that service providers today cannot run IPTV services "out of the box." In order to successfully implement and make money from these services they must partner with a vendor that will do extra and sophisticated network design work, and that can supply additional technology to prevent network over-subscription and other problems.

Cisco delivered on these requirements in our test – providing a new generation of hardware specifically suited for large-scale, real-time video deployment. Its proprietary video enhancement software worked well; and Cisco’s design proposal worked superbly in our mock service provider network, providing us with a high level of confidence that the solution will easily scale to the design goal of a million users and beyond. In other words, Cisco did extremely well in a hugely challenging test. (See Testing Cisco's IPTV Infrastructure.)

Here's a hyperlinked table of contents:

THE TEST

• IPTV: What Is It?

• Architectural Challenges

• EANTC Test Requirements

• Cisco’s Solution Design

• Emulation of Network Services & DSLAMs

• Logistics & Test Rules

THE RESULTS

• IPTV Infrastructure Performance & Scaleability

• Aggregated Multicast Throughput & Latency

• Mixed-Class Throughput & Latency

• Multicast Source Limitations

• IPTV Quality of Service

• Services Hierarchy

• Multicast Traffic Prioritization

• Multicast-Based Admission Control

• Network Resilience

• Node Failure

• Link Failure

• Multicast Source Redundancy

• Cisco-Specific Tests

• Cisco's Video Quality Experience

— Carsten Rossenhövel is Managing Director of the European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) , an independent test lab in Berlin. EANTC offers vendor-neutral network test facilities for manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises. Carsten heads EANTC's manufacturer testing and certification group and is responsible for the design of test methods and applications.

— Jambi Ganbar is Senior Test Engineer at EANTC, focusing proof-of-concept tests of triple-play core, aggregation, and access networks. Before joining EANTC, Jambi had worked for MCI and CAIDA.org.