Mividi IP Video Monitoring System (TSM100) is an ideal choice for monitoring video QoS of IPTV services.
In general, IPTV service providers acquire video content from multiple sources, including satellite, fiber optical cable, terrestrial broadcast, as well as locally generated videos.
The source streams may be decoded and re-encoded to satisfy their bandwidth allocation needs and meet the specification of customers’ receiving devices. Therefore, it is common that hundreds of programs and many different transport streams are being processed in service providers’ head-ends. Additional complexity may be added in order to process advertisement insertion and provide EPG information.
In order to provide their customers video services with best-possible quality, service providers need to actively monitor their services at multiple points where streams are processed.
The Mividi TSM100 contains necessary features that can meet the testing need of these service providers, including:
- High-bandwidth monitoring capability which can monitor up to 300 services simultaneously in a single system
- Comprehensive analysis of transport stream errors according to TR 101 290 test guideline
- Measures IP packet jitter and media loss rate
- Supports multiple TV standards, including meta data analysis of MPEG, DVB and ATSC streams
- Supports SPTS and MPTS over unicast or multicast
The following example illustrates using a TSM100 to monitor video services in an IPTV headend. In this application, a customer has near 80 transport streams going out from a single router. These include locally generated as well as streams received via satellites. A TSM100 system is connected to a router via its fiber optical SFP interface. The TSM100 continuously sends out multicast join messages in order to receive all transport streams in multicast. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of system configuration.
Figure 1: Architecture diagram of IPTV testing configuration
Upon receiving transport streams, the system will perform detailed analysis on the IP layer, including protocol and bandwidth analysis, media delivery index (MDI) calculation to measure the media loss and IP packet jitter loss, RTP sequence analysis and loss characterization for RTP streams. If any values are out of bound, errors are generated and logged in data base.
The system also performs comprehensive analysis on the MPEG TS layer. Transport streams are tested according to the DVB test guideline TR 101 290 or ATSC A78. TS errors are detected and logged in the database. Based on these measurement results, the system will calculate a single TS quality score, and operators can use this quality score to set alarm trigger. All detected errors as well as transport stream snapshots are saved in a database and can be viewed and searched at later times. Multiple reports can be generated on TS error and status history.