Home network management for IPTV service operations — A service provider perspective

As the global IPTV market is growing fast, assurance of IPTV service quality becomes one of the key factors to the success of IPTV business. To deal with the IPTV service assurance issue, one of the practical approaches that the service provider can apply is to employ the state-of-the-art development technologies (e.g., NGOSS frameworks) to construct an IPTV management platform, in which a number of Operations Support Systems (OSS) can be seamlessly integrated and co-work to support the daily IPTV service operations. In this paper, an end-to-end IPTV network management architecture was depicted, and a unified network management system (NMS) was developed to monitor and control multi-vendor, multi-technology broadband network elements deployed in the carrier's head end, core network, access network, and home network. The in-house NMS supports loosely-coupled systems integration with other OSS based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA). Moreover, a practical approach to home network management was described to show how the NMS automatically collects a variety of IPTV-related data from set-top boxes (STBs) and then provides some useful management functions (e.g., video/audio packet loss analysis and IPTV audience rating) for the ease of service assurance and the exploration of subscribers' tastes for IPTV programs.