End-to-End Quality of Service Monitoring in Convergent IPTV Platforms

Nowadays main service providers are launching the first convergent TV over IP (IPTV) commercial services, which are offered from either mobile or fixed broadband networks. This article shows a common architecture for monitoring the QoS (Quality of Service) of IPTV convergent platforms. This solution, based on the analysis of quality figures through network probes, will allow service providers to offer their convergent services in a competitive manner. The proposal includes the development of an OSS (Operational Support System) founded on a common open architecture that gathers the data from the different network segments in a convergent way. This feature means that the IPTV services are permanently end-to-end supervised from the access networks (mobile and fixed) and the convergent core network. In this specific scenario, two different access networks are considered: digital TV over ADSL or GPON/FTTH, and mobileTV over UMTS/3G. On the other hand, the common convergent network is constituted by the content delivery platform and the central services center, which orchestrate the services offered to end users, such as multicast TV, Video on Demand (VoD) or Pay-per-view (PPV). This paper includes the results obtained from this OSS, applied to a major mobile convergent Telco company, for the VoD service based on videostreaming sessions.