Technologies | IPTV Quality of Experience

Validate IPTV Quality of Experience (QoE) under realistic and scalable triple play network conditions

Agilent N2X is the industry’s most comprehensive test solution for testing the development and deployment of network services for converging network infrastructures.

Service Providers, Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs), and component manufacturers can verify service attributes of entire networks end-to-end, while also isolating problems down to individual networking devices and subsystems.

Carriers/service providers are completing their triple play service bundle with IPTV services to compete with Cable MSO’s and increase their average revenue per user (ARPU). A critical success factor for increasing IPTV service adoption and subscriber retention is satisfaction with the IPTV service quality. Dynamic subscriber behaviors, such as IPTV channel changing (zapping), combined with a mix of triple play traffic severely stresses access network equipment which can compromise the video quality. NEM's and Service Providers must ensure IPTV quality expectations can be met for each and every subscriber under realistic and highlyscaled network conditions.

The Agilent N2X IPTV QoE Test Solution can:

• Validate IPTV infrastructure scalability limits by emulating and measuring thousands of subscribers and 500 channels per port of actual video
• Quantify IPTV QoE degradation due to the impact of other triple play services, such as time-sensitive voice and bursty data traffic
• Create a real-world test environment, helping to ensure IPTV quality isn’t compromised by network instabilities, by emulating dynamic subscriber behavior such as channel zapping, new Internet
  connection requests and DHCP session-flapping
• Validate IPTV service quality for every subscriber through per subscriber MDI video quality measurements
• View actual video quality by replaying captured video, providing faster “time to insight”

Dynamic subscriber simulation

N2X can simulate up to 2048 subscribers per port, and tens of thousands per system. N2X simulates realistic triple play customers, with each subscriber using IPTV services on up to 4 different Set Top Boxes, in addition to VoIP and Internet services. N2X provides complete control over behavior of each simulated subscriber and service so you can identify how this network instability impacts IPTV service quality.

Combined video, voice and data traffic generation

N2X can generate full line rate IPTV video traffic on 512 channels per GbE port. You can send up to four unique video clips on each channel, and combine different video traffic profiles from a pre-defined library of source clips along with other background service traffic to stress the device or network under test and determine how this impacts QoE.

Highly scalable video quality metrics

N2X can uniquely test the scalability limits of each network device, as defined by RFC 4445, by measuring Media Delivery Index (MDI) delay factor and loss metrics on a per subscriber basis.

Comprehensive testing for IPTV and triple play services

Agilent offers a powerful and comprehensive solution for testing IPTV Quality of Experience and the scalability, reliability and underlying security of triple play services.

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