• HOME
• COVER STORY
• CASE STUDY
• TECHNOLOGY UPDATE

Building a Foundation for Customer-driven Growth: Media Aware Networking

Video Internet services are one of the biggest game-changers in broadband today. Ten years ago, the network industry was focused on making data networks as reliable as voice networks. Today, a new reliability metric has emerged: managing video like voice. If carriers can’t manage video services like phone services in terms of quality, regardless of the complexities and challenges, they may get left behind in the marketplace.

On a worldwide basis, the introduction of next generation broadband networks is reshaping communications and entertainment. New Internet services, such as YouTube and iTunes are changing the way broadband networks are being used and the resulting requirements for equipment vendors. Carriers are trying to capitalize on these trends and upgrading their networks to better manage data, voice and video services in harmony.

Integrating data, voice, and video services is one challenge. Fixing the network congestion problem is another. Unmanaged video services can kill the core of most broadband networks. For example, cell phone video broadcasts today are enormously popular, but most carriers can only support just 6% of subscribers watching cell phone videos at the same time. Most cell phone networks will fail when video traffic exceeds 7%. Similarly, video-on-demand services can easily overwhelm older broadband infrastructures. Service providers and carriers must build and design their networks to prevent Internet video services from overwhelming the network infrastructure.

New video services are more bandwidth intensive and require higher levels of service provisioning. For carriers and service providers seeking to retain and attract customers with these new types of offerings, there is an ever growing need for flexibility and intelligence in the network — a need for the Media Aware Network — to balance the demand requirements and the resulting overall network investment/ maintenance.

Figure 1 — Characteristics of New Service Offerings

As Figure 1 shows, the whole range of new service opportunities represents significant challenges. New services tend to more bandwidth hungry, demonstrate greater amounts of variability in terms of network load and have greater performance demands. What’s the payoff for a carrier or service provider in making the investment to secure service levels? As the YouTube phenomenon illustrates, new services can have extremely short adoption cycles — but only if executed properly. As more and more services compete for the consumer’s attention across devices and channels, it is an imperative for the service provider to demonstrate success early. The margin for error is slim in today’s competitive world.

The other great challenge is in meeting the divergent demands of the respective market segments. New services represent value-add opportunities for the service providers, so effective marketing and backend management is critical to realize this extra value. Whether it’s ensuring targeted advertising, personalized packages or billing for additional levels of service, the network infrastructure needs to be robust, granular and flexible enough to manage whatever future additions are planned.

The Media Aware Network has four mission-critical capabilities: customer control to enable personalization of services and backend management, media inspection to enforce policies such as security, proactive QoS to prioritize traffic and incorporate end customer preferences, and media optimization to manage network resources effectively once in active use.

Figure 2 — Key Elements for Media Aware Network

Customer Control
Whether it’s the choice of ringtone, homepage design or choice of TV programming, consumers display both divergent needs and will continue to want things ‘their way.’ As a provider’s service portfolio expands to meet the universe of needs, and service bundling emerges as a viable method of customization, the requirement for flexibility in packaging and managing bundles grows. Critical network requirements for managing this efficiently are the awareness and control of individual preferences. Network intelligence to identify and allow such personalization from choice of services through to billing will help ensure network efficiency in resource allocation. For example, the home of teenagers active in gaming and multimedia entertainment will need more support than a home with only basic VoIP, and internet surfing.

Media Inspection
Once individual policies are chosen or are assigned, additional value added services are possible through constant awareness of end user actions and identity. From the consumer’s standpoint, additional security services are possible. From an operator’s standpoint, compliance with CALEA becomes enhanced to the degree to which the features such as traffic mirroring are available.

Proactive QoS
Service providers today are evolving their networks towards an all-IP infrastructure to create a consistent foundation for next generation applications. While this trend facilitates the delivery of a wide range of new services, it also imposes challenges to the delivery of real-time traffic. Packetized voice and video as well as traffic from other emerging new applications are all very sensitive to latency and jitter. In some applications such as mobile handset to network controller synchronization, network latency exceeding just tens of milliseconds can result in dropped calls, or even worse, the need to reset an entire service coverage area. Proactive QoS is necessary not only to prioritize traffic, but to guarantee delivery of traffic within strict performance bounds.

Media Optimization
Once priorities are assigned, constant network vigilance and management of session service levels will ensure an optimal end user experience. For example, in the case of multiple subscribers within a single household experiencing interference, this level of control will restrict data services to best effort levels of service and reallocate bandwidth to concurrent video streaming to satisfy the less-forgiving demands of video.

An overarching requirement beyond the technical requirements outlined above is the financial requirement. Although upfront capital expenditure is an obvious metric, it’s the downstream operating expenses that can distinguish solutions over time to significantly impact the profitability of ongoing new services (see Yankee Group Feb, 2006 Study.) The ideal solution will allow a smooth migration from the current platform without impacting customer experience, allow extension of the infrastructure already in place, and limit the complexity of the resulting architecture for the sake of operating expenses.

The challenge in planning a build-out of infrastructure is the inability to see the future with perfect accuracy. To avoid building the next legacy system, planning a network with high degrees of functionality and flexibility will ensure a foundation for revenue growth in whatever competitive world lies ahead.