Introducing IP-TV, impacts and adjustments to the distribution and back-bone network of a network operator

Abstract: TDC Song has just entered the private market with Internet Access and VoIP services. To stay competitive on the market in the future, the company will be required to offer the customers video- and TV- services and have a complete triple play packet. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to determine which techniques that exist within IPTV, analyze TDC Song’s network and see what actions the company needs to take in network design and network quality in order to distribute a premium packet with up to 50 channels when using Moving Picture Experts Group phase 2 (MPEG-2) to compress the video. A literature study was made to get knowledge about IPTV and the available standards to compress, transmit and display the video. Furthermore, tests were set up and performed in both laboratory and real life network environments. The theoretical study showed that the network should be configured with Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) as the intra-domain routing protocol and Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) as the inter-domain protocol to connect the PIM-SM domains together. The switches that can handle layer 3 routing should also be configured with PIM-SM and the other switches should use Internet Group Management Protocol Snooping to enhance their performance. In the laboratory tests the Extreme Summit48i switch couldn’t act as Rendezvous Point (RP), but has no problem with handling multicast traffic up to 1 Gbps. No multicast traffic ought to be transmitted in the parts of the network where the Cisco routers 7206 and 3640 are situated, since their performance decrease and they will drop packets. The downlink speed from the network to the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer (DSLAMs) should be upgraded from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to be able to handle the IPTV, VoIP and Internet traffic with as little congestion as possible. A buffer in the Set-Top Box should be enough to eliminate any jitter the network may cause. To be able to handle packet losses and the limited bandwidth, the network should be designed with a separate VLAN per service. This will make it possible for the company to prioritize IPTV by using VLAN tags to give Quality of Service.