Information Technology

February 7, 2007
Agilent helps operators resolve QoE issues

NEW DELHI -- Agilent Technologies recently launched a triple play analyser for video, voice and data monitoring, analysis and troubleshooting that enables companies to capture broadband market share and revenue faster.

The Agilent J6900A is claimed to be the most complete test tool for network equipment manufacturers and communication service providers, who develop, install, maintain and troubleshoot new triple play voice, video, and data networks and services. This flexible analysis improves operational efficiency by offering a solution for all types of services under a single local or distributed platform. Efficiency is increased at least three times by having a single instrument for all types of services with drill-down capabilities to the root cause of problems. The analyser provides a single instrument for all services testing, one user interface to learn and a consistent troubleshooting methodology.

The J6900A triple play analyser solution is the perfect tool to detect and resolve signaling, transport and voice/video/data quality of experience (QoE) problems before customers are affected.

This device addresses numerous issues related to network interoperability, voice and video media transport, service delivery, QoE, and IP network performance in a single comprehensive tool without the need for expertise or programming. It provides the essential measurements and key performance indicators that enable engineers and technicians to quickly and proactively identify customer problems, empowering faster, less-expensive and higher-quality triple play deployments and networks.

Convergence Plus spoke with Shekhar Nayudu, vice president, Electronic Measurements Group, I&M, Agilent Technologies India, to know more about the QoS issues related to triple-play deployment. Excerpts.

Convergence Plus: How useful will be Agilent J6900A for the triple play market?

Shekhar Nayudu: Success in the triple-play market is all related to user QoE. It is not solely a function of network bandwidth, voice and video transport stream metrics and/or traffic characteristics, but rather how all features and services interact with each other from the end user’s perspective. The triple-play analyser (TPA) software application allows network professionals to troubleshoot, monitor, analyse, maintain and optimise real-time voice, data and video services over next generation IP networks.

The TPA is part of the Agilent Network Analysis Troubleshooting Solutions and provides a top-level dashboard view that shows the performance of IPTV, VoD, VoIP and broadband data applications in a single window with the ability to drill down and view extensive QoE measurements for the select services.

CP: How will this analyser help network operators measure the end user QoE?

SN: The TPA provides the crucial measurements needed for all service types to accurately and passively measure the end-user’s QoE. The included protocol and network analysis features, with support for over 500 protocols, allows one to perform deep packet troubleshooting and analysis for each service type, or to select flows to identify the root cause of service degradations. The base software provides a real-time dashboard that allows users to see the performance and traffic distribution of all triple play services. It provides detailed drill down into each service type with the optional licenses and includes the Network Analysis software for detailed network analysis and protocol decodes to drill to root-cause once impairments are detected.

CP: What range of issues is it capable of addressing?

SN: The TPA is one of the key software applications in Agilent’s Network Analysis and Troubleshooting Solutions, which are built on the Distributed Network Analyser (DNA) hardware platform. The scaleable DNA architecture provides the foundation for advanced protocol analysis, monitoring and troubleshooting in fixed wireline and mobile networks. The DNA hardware platform brings greater power for collecting and analysing real-time data over multiple technologies such as Ethernet, ATM, POS, Frame Relay, IPv4, IPv6, MPLS, VoIP, IPTV, HSDPA, HSUPA, UMTS, CDMA2000, GPRS, etc.

The TPA runs on a Windows PC as a client for any of the DNA hardware platforms and this architecture makes the TPA an ideal solution for dispatched or distributed analysis. With the TPA, a communications service provider has a powerful solution for wireline as well as advanced mobile networks.

CP: What are the QoS issues related to triple-play deployment? 

SN: From a QoS perspective, triple-play is very complex. The service provider has to constantly monitor the QoS on a real time basis.

The J6900A TPA dashboard automatically detects triple play services and transforms the data into meaningful diagnostic and QoS information. Constantly monitoring the traffic on your network the dashboard provides a top-level view of the triple play services and allows users to quickly view the performance of the entire service. As quality issues arise, the user can easily drill from the dashboard into specific service to perform in-depth analysis and measurements. It does this for each protocol stack, all in real time as events actually occur. The dashboard is broken into Data, Video, Voice, Protocol and Service graphs.

The TPA Video QoE measurements provide real-time analysis of MPEG-2 transport streams and QoE metrics for multicast IPTV streams and unicast VoD streams. The QoE view also allows users to watch and listen to streams of interest in real-time.

Voice QoE measurements provide real-time analysis of RTP streams for voice and video. The Voice Quality of Experience measurements provide simple and precise diagnostics of VoIP Quality of Service metrics through non-intrusive measurements, including a voice quality measurement technology to accurately predict Mean Opinion Scores (MOS).

IPTV services present new challenges for channel and video control that can severely impact QoE even when video transport is good. The TPA Video QoE measurements include real-time analysis of IPTV and VoD signaling. The TPA passively calculates IGMP channel change times using the most accurate method available based on when a Set Top Box is first able to decode video.

The data measurement provides a high level overview of the data performance and provides a quick drill down for more detailed analysis such as current and maximum utilisation in real time and provides current, average, minimum and peak data in tabular format.