Designing a collector overlay architecture for fault diagnosis in video networks

    Authors

    M. Venkataraman; S. Sengupta; M. Chatterjee;R. Neogi

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Comput. Commun.

    Keywords

    IPTV; VoD; Access network; Fault diagnosis; DETECTABILITY; INTERNET; Computer Science, Information Systems; Engineering, Electrical &; Electronic; Telecommunications

    Abstract

    To prevent subscriber churn, network service providers of VoD, SDV and IPTV have a pressing need to pro-actively detect, isolate and fix outages within an access network. Network induced degradations prove to be detrimental for streaming applications. This typically leads to a poor quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers. By monitoring key functional points of the access network for traces of degradation, service providers can devise mechanisms to mitigate the problem. In this work we propose a hierarchy of exporters, collectors and ANCON (ANalysis and CONtrol) nodes that can semi-autonomously monitor, detect and isolate impairments within an access network. Exporters on the data plane gather and disseminate statistics for individual subnets, which are streamed onto "collector" nodes on an orthogonal plane. Collector nodes aggregate traffic from various exporters, and stream them onto the root of the tree (ANCON). With an even placement of exporters, root cause analysis can now take the granularity of loss rates or delay rates in individual segments or subnets of an access network. As an extension to our architecture, we show that the overlay can support instrumentations of quality evaluation for streaming video. As an example, we use a simple MOS plugin that is in part an extension of the ITU-T Erlang model to predict the quality of a video stream much before it reaches the end user. We show that our overlay can support a wide variety of quality evaluation metrics. Through extensive simulations and an implementation, we discuss issues of engineering such an overlay, isolating impairments in access networks, instrumenting MOS plugins and predicting video quality of multimedia streams in transit. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

    Journal Title

    Computer Communications

    Volume

    35

    Issue/Number

    4

    Publication Date

    1-1-2012

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    418

    Last Page

    430

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000301313800002

    ISSN

    0140-3664

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