Cisco Unveils IP NGN Video Optimized Transport

Cisco outlined its approach for a zero-loss video-optimized transport architecture for service providers and broadcasters. The need for the solution is driven by the explosive growth in video traffic over IP backbones, which Cisco forecasts will grow more than 500 percent to almost half a zettabyte over the next five years. This represents more than half of all IP traffic and by 2014 will generate an estimated $250 billion in revenue.


The Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) Video Optimized Transport promises to monitor, detect and isolate video-quality impairments over standards-based carrier-grade Ethernet infrastructure.


It accomplishes this using three Cisco technologies for optimizing medianets, specifically Cisco Multicast-Only Fast Reroute (MoFRR), which provides a simple and efficient method for transport of reliable video streams in secondary distribution video applications; hitless switchover or Cisco Live-Live, which provides spatial redundancy for video streams and is useful in contribution video applications; and inline video monitoring (Cisco VidMon), which provides a network-based mechanism for monitoring of video quality.


To handle packet loss for high-quality IP video transport, Cisco is proposing Multicast-Only Fast Reroute (MoFRR), which it claims will ensure sub-50-msec multicast video convergence time with minimal configuration or operational overhead. This will provide video path protection from the video source to the receiver router during both link and node failure. Cisco said MoFRR needs to be enabled only on the last-hop receiver router and does not require any configuration or protocol-level interaction with other routers.


To provide efficient, inline video monitoring, Cisco is proposing network-based monitoring through the router transport line card. This approach is cheaper and more scalable than blade-based network monitoring solutions, according to the company, and if a video anomaly is detected it can automatically switch over to the backup path automatically and instantly, without any manual intervention.


A whitepaper is available on the Cisco website.
http://www.cisco.com