WASHINGTON D.C.—The role of artificial intelligence in optimizing spectrum efficiency was an important theme today during a gathering at FCC headquarters here exploring how AI can be used for the benefit of networks and consumers alike.

Organized jointly by the Federal Communications Commission and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the program, called “The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence for Communications Networks and Consumers,” brought together representatives from the agency, NSF, academia, public interest, advocacy and industry.

Leading off the day, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel branded herself as an optimist about AI despite recent concerns raised by the release of generative AI and warnings from prominent technologists.

“From my perch at the head of our nation’s expert agency on communications, I cannot help but be an optimist about the future of AI," she said. 

“My optimism comes from where I sit because every day I see communications network power our world,” she said. 

“I know how their expansion and evolution can enhance modern civic and commercial life. I also know the power of those communications networks is going to grow exponentially when we use AI to understand how to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our networks,” she said.

“The day is not all that far off when we will be able to use this technology to help self-configure, self-optimize and self-heal facilities,” said Rosenworcel.

NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who followed Rosenworcel, pointed out the foundation has invested more than $800 million in AI, including funds for 25 AI institutes around the country to drive innovation.

Margaret Martonosi, NSF lead of computer and information science and engineering, delivered the keynote discussing the role the foundation has and is playing in promoting development of AI. “NSF is an agency that is about making sure the right seeds get planted and the right trees get nurtured over many decades,” she said. 

Martonosi offered several examples of how the foundation is supporting AI and wireless development. One, AI-EDGE, or the AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence, is receiving $20 million in NSF funding. Led by Ohio State University, AI-EDGE is looking into how AI can be used in networks to improve how they flow, she said.

“I want you to think about it in a bidirectional way,” she said. “Some of the research is about using AI for networks to improve how networks flow, to improve the virtualization, to improve the routing and management of traffic and management of the security,” she said. 

‘The other thing is about using those networks for AI to improve data collection and analysis—how we can do more of the analysis at the edge to save on bandwidth and energy.”

The first panel of the day focused on AI application trends and how AI research is advancing them. Joining the panel were Nageen Himayat, senior principal engineer at Intel; Randy Berry, chair and professor of ECE at Northwestern University; Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge; Lisa Guess, senior vice president of solutions engineering at Ericsson; and Ness Shroff, chaired professor of ECE and CSE at Ohio State University. Martin Doczkat, chief of the Technical Analysis Branch of the Office of Engineering and Technology at the FCC moderated.

Shroff, who explained that 11 U.S. universities, five international universities, machine learning and wireless networking companies and Department of Defense labs are partners in Ohio State University’s AI-EDGE effort, said the institute is looking to leverage “synergies that exist between AI and networks.”

“To control and design for the next generation of networks, we will need foundational AI advances that take into account the very specific constraints [of those]… networks,” he said. Research is needed into “non-stationality” so that an autonomous vehicle doesn’t make an unwanted lefthand turn off the road, for example.

AI also has many roles to play in more efficient use of spectrum. Radio access networks are an example. “[T]housands of control knobs” are present in RAN base stations today, he said.

““If you look at the open RAN paradigm, there is a special entity called the Radio Intelligence Controller, which is meant to execute these AI/ ML modules to perform various actions, to learn about the traffic, to make decisions on traffic control,” said Shroff.

The role of AI today is at a high level, but the focus is shifting to introduce AI more deeply into protocol stacks, said Himayat.

“There is success in terms of using AI to actually replace certain functions, certain parts of functions, looking at parameters that could be estimated better to improve performance of existing algorithms,” she said.

Beam forming and prediction of reflection paths in cellular transmission are areas where AI could improve the efficiency of wireless networks, said Feld.

“[AI] has the potential to do much more…particularly in terms of interference mitigation,” he said.

Artificial intelligence also has a role to play in helping companies monetize machine-to-machine communications as network patterns change, said Guess. “We are going to need to leverage AI to take what we have today in order to squeeze every little bit that we can out of it [the spectrum],” she said.

Another possible role for AI is to make wireless networks more environmentally friendly by predicting where it might be possible to reduce power in parts of the network that may exhibit lower usage, she said.

Berry suggested there may be some new roles for the FCC when it comes to AI. For example, increasingly access relies on a combination of the network, storage and compute. “When we think about what does it mean to provide universal access does this mean we have to think about storage and compute as well –not just about how much bandwidth someone has?” he asked rhetorically.

As panelist discussed, spectrum sharing can benefit from AI, but before that can be fully realized the FCC may need to get involved. “…[Y]ou need the data. Where do you get that data for that [to promote spectrum sharing]? Are the incumbents going to show the data? That again feels like something the FCC might want to think about,” said Berry.

The second panel of the day was focused on consumer issues that might benefit from AI, such as better customer service, combatting robocalls, spoofing and other scams and making telecommunications networks and services more accessible for those with disabilities and minorities.

Panelists included: Elham Tabassi, chief of staff at the Information Technology Laboratory; Greg Bohl, chief data officer at Transaction Network Services; Alisa Valentin, senior director for telecom policy at the National Urban League; Jorge Amar, senior partner at McKinsey & Company; and Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities. Arpan Sura, senior counsel in the FCCC Wireless Bureau moderated.

FCC commissioners Nathan Simington and Geoffrey Starks also addressed the gathering. 

Since the first document release in 2017, the SMPTE ST 2110 suite of standards for video transport over IP networks has made major inroads in the market for professional video and audio production gear. By removing the highly-compressed, unreliable stigma created by early IP streaming technologies (looking at you, Flash), ST 2110 enabled bit-perfect production systems to be built using widely-available Ethernet networking gear. 

As IP networking infrastructure continues to grow in capacity—while simultaneously lowering the cost per bit—IP systems have become ever-more capable and affordable. Like any major technology refresh, the transition to IP-centric media systems has experienced a few bumps along the way, but overall progress has been steady and new products are filling in the few remaining gaps needed to support every conceivable broadcast application.

When first released in 2017, ST 2110 provided a standard way to transport video over general purpose IP networks. Since it was targeted as a direct replacement for SDI, the focus was on uncompressed video inside a live studio production environment. 

One important difference from SDI is that each signal type is transported in a separate stream of packets, thereby eliminating the need to “embed” audio signals within their associated video signals. Synchronization is provided by distributing a precision (PTP) clock to every media device on the network, thereby allowing each device to align its outputs to a common timing reference point.

Market Impact
Over the past five years, IP media transport generally and ST 2110 specifically have made major inroads within the professional broadcast market. According to John Mailhot, CTO, Networking and Infrastructure for Imagine Communications, the industry has already reached the point where “ST 2110 is a better choice for greenfield studio construction and for applications that require more than 512 video router crosspoints.” 

Alan Wollenstein, director, Engineering Systems for the National Football League, spoke about how critical ST 2110 technology was for the implementation of the NFL Network’s new Los Angeles Facility in Inglewood, Calif. “We have 19 physical and 75 virtual edit bays in our new facility, which stretches over 200 yards from one end to the other. It simply would not have been possible to build this brand-new installation without using ST 2110.” 

New Updates in 2022
ST 2110 is made up of a number of standards, each of which covers one aspect of IP media transport; this makes it so that each of these documents can be updated independently.  Many of the core set of ST 2110 standards were updated in 2022, as shown in Fig. 1. The good news about these updates is that they were done very carefully, so as to avoid breaking equipment and software that were built using the 2017 edition of the standards. Here are a few highlights on the new standards:

ST 2110-10 System Definition: This document focuses on providing better information for control systems.  Two new (recommended) SDP parameters have been added: TSDELAY and TSMODE.  The first of these, TSDELAY, allows a device to indicate the amount of time (in microseconds) that elapses between the sampling or other time indicated by the RTP timestamp for a packet and the time that the first packet containing that timestamp is emitted by that device. 

The second of these, TSMODE, allows a device to indicate whether or not the RTP timestamps present on packets coming into the device are preserved or modified in the output of the device. Used together, these two new parameters allow a broadcast controller to more accurately assess the delays incurred within each step of a workflow, allowing tighter control of end-to-end delays and simplifying overall media synchronization.

ST 2110-20 Uncompressed Video: This adds support for two new video formats.  One addition supports a new Transfer Characteristic (the “TCS” parameter in SDP, which indicates how binary pixel values relate to pixel brightness) to support “Camera Log S3” as defined in SMPTE ST 2115 (and is used in a wide variety of high-end video and digital cinema cameras). The other addition was a new colorimetry type of “ALPHA” which is specifically designated for key signals, while it was clarified the key signals must not declare a TCS value. 

ST 2110-21 Traffic Shaping: This new version clarifies that the virtual receiver buffer  (VRX) constraints do not apply for constant bitrate compressed video signals, and providing a more flexible way of calculating the timing for interlaced video in order to support standard definition video formats (which are still used in many applications around the globe).

ST 2110-22 Compressed Video: This revision clarified that the Virtual Receiver Buffer constraints in the packet timing model do not apply, and cleared up some confusion about how the bitrate of a compressed signal is defined in SDP.

ST 2110-30 Uncompressed Audio: This document is currently undergoing very minor revisions to clarify some wording and to provide clearer descriptions of the audio receiver conformance levels.

ST 2110-40 Ancillary Data: This new revision creates two packet transmission models for ancillary data. LLTM, the Low Latency Transmission Model, requires senders to transmit ancillary data packets within 8 video lines of their specified location. CTM, the Compatible Transmission Model, allows a 1 msec window for transmission. These are signaled with the SDP parameter “TM.” One other minor change was to require senders to transmit packets in increasing order by original line number.”

IPMX
One major way that ST 2110 technology is being expanded to support new applications is in the development of IPMX (Internet Protocol Media eXperience). The goal of this development is to help reduce the cost of ST 2110 technology for applications that may not require its full range of capabilities. 

Another goal is to produce the first truly open, license-free IP video specification for the ProAV market (in contrast with NDI, SDVoE and HDBaseT). IPMX supports HDCP content protection, multi-monitor synchronization, FEC (Forward Error Correction), EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) and a variety of other features that are crucial to supporting this market. 

IPMX specifications are currently being developed by a group within the Video Services Forum (the same source as many of the key concepts behind ST 2110). More info, including downloadable copies of all
the released specification can be found at www.vsf.tv.

What the Future Holds
Not everything is perfect in the world of ST 2110. The capabilities of system and broadcast controllers are lagging behind those of video and audio endpoints, at least based on the results of the JT-NM Tested event in Wuppertal, Germany last August. Development of these systems proceeds apace, with particular emphasis on improving IP network security for broadcast devices. 

Most of the key ST 2110 standards have stabilized, and are not expected to change much (if at all) in the coming years.  This is good news for developers and implementers, allowing them to focus on fine-tuning and cost-reducing existing designs, rather than having to implement new features. It is likely that system cost reductions will also continue, as video systems are now more closely aligned with present trends in the much larger IT and datacom industry (including Moore’s Law and other factors). 

John Mailhot noted that “The cost premium for ST 2110 in media endpoints is going away, and the cost of 100 gigabit optics is dropping dramatically.”  Advances in Ethernet switch capabilities will also help significantly; Alan Wollenstein indicated that “The choice of spine and leaf IP network architecture for our facility was key for our application.”

Cloud-based production is much easier to implement with an IP-native technology like ST 2110 as compared to SDI-based systems. As more ST 2110 systems migrate from using uncompressed video to deploying JPEG XS or other compressed formats, the costs of transporting video to and from the cloud will become more attractive, making other benefits of the cloud (including rapid scalability, AI-based functions, pay-as-you go, and more) accessible to a wider market. 

Overall, today’s market and technology trends will continue to make ST 2110-based systems more affordable and flexible throughout the broadcast industry.  Pretty impressive for a six-year-old! 

WASHINGTON—As network usage has seen high increases over the last few weeks because of stay-at-home policies related to the coronavirus pandemic, network providers—including broadband and telephone services on fixed and cellular networks—told FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on a conference call that are meeting these new demands.

Reported network usage has increased 20-35% for fixed networks and 10-20% for cellular networks in recent weeks, with surges in the suburbs, exurbs and residential areas and during daytime hours. The expectation from the providers is that they will be able to keep up with these demands.

“It appears that our nation’s communications networks are holding up very well amid the increase in traffic and change in usage patterns,” said Pai. “That’s thanks in part to networks being designed to handle ever-higher peak traffic loads in part to a market-based regulatory framework that has promoted infrastructure investment and deployment. That said, we will continue to closely monitor the situation.”

Pai praised trade associations that have been reporting nationwide data on their websites, including NCTA.

He also thanked broadband and telephone services that took his Keep Americans Connected Pledge.

“I also want to thank communication workers who are on the front lines for their efforts in helping Americans get connected, stay connected and troubleshoot any problems during these challenging times,” Pai said.

November 15, 2019, UK, London:Arqiva, the international satellite and media services provider, has been selected by the international television company A+E Networks EMEA to provide on-demand content for the channel’s Amazon Prime on demand service in Germany and UK.

A+E Networks® EMEA, has been an Arqiva customer for over a decade, with the existing partnership spanning playout and connectivity across Africa and the Middle East, UK DTH satellite capacity and on-premise VoD processing services across EMEA (including the UK). As part of the new contract, Arqiva will manage the content processing, packaging and delivery of A+E Networks EMEA existing archive content in both UK and Germany, from where it is currently stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, to Amazon Prime.

One of A+E Networks EMEA’s key requirements was for the solution to be able to process all VoD requests as close to the cloud-based archive as possible in order to minimise content movement and therefore avoid costly cloud egress into on-premise data centres. Based on its latest hybrid on-premise/cloud offering, the solution implemented by Arqiva is the first to feature a completely cloud-contained journey, where content is taken from the online archive, processed packaged and delivered to Amazon Prime. This not only ensures significant cost-savings but transcoding in the cloud using AWS Elemental MediaConvert also enables Arqiva to process more simultaneous jobs at a far quicker pace.

Another primary factor in A+E Network EMEA’s decision to select Arqiva’s fully managed solution was its ability to integrate the company’s existing Identity and Access Management resources, ensuring the security of the platform whilst allowing A+E to retain full control of its content access and operation capabilities.

Matt Westrup, VP Technology and Operations at A+E Networks EMEA, said:“In a very dynamic and competitive media environment the ability to quickly and seamlessly deliver an even broader range of A+E Networks EMEA’s premium content to our Amazon Prime audience is a real strategic advantage. A solution like this means we can effortlessly build on our broadcast heritage in a viable way.”

Alex Pannell, Commercial Director Video Channels at Arqiva, said:“This deal marks a really important milestone for Arqiva. A+E Networks Germany is the first customer to use our new cloud VoD solution and its feedback on both the platform and onboarding process has been fantastic. We’ve been working really hard to extend our broadcast products onto cloud infrastructure and have built up an extensive set of skills and experience building on AWS. We see the fact that a major multi-channel broadcaster has adopted the cloud for its content archive as clear proof this was the right strategy to pursue for the future.”

About Arqiva

Arqiva is a leading UK communications infrastructure and media services provider dedicated to connecting people wherever they are through the delivery of TV, radio, mobile and machine to machine communications.

We are an independent provider of telecom towers, with circa 8,000 active sites across Great Britain, and are also the only supplier of national terrestrial television and radio broadcasting services in the UK. Our advanced networks support the exponential growth of connected devices and the ever-increasing demand for data from smartphones to tablets, connected TVs to smart meters.

Customers include major UK and international broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV, Sky Plc., Turner Broadcasting, the independent radio groups, major telco providers – including the UK's four mobile network operators – and energy and water companies.

For more information, news and insights from Arqiva, please visit the website at: www.arqiva.com

About A+E Networks EMEA

A+E Networks EMEA is a leading global media network reaching 74m homes in more than 100 countries across UK, Europe, Africa and Middle East. Our portfolio of popular, high performing and creative brands - HISTORY®, Crime+Investigation®, Lifetime®, HISTORY2®, UK free to air BLAZE®, COSMO in Spain and dedicated VOD brands on key platforms HISTORY Play and Crime+Investigation Play - have entertained and inspired audiences for over 20 years; telling the stories that need to be told. We complement our award-winning factual and entertainment local commissions and global hit factual and drama series with innovative talent-led exclusive digital content and top-rated podcasts. We partner with 366 major operators broadcasting throughout UK, Africa, CEE, German Speaking Markets, Iberia and Italy. With offices in London, Johannesburg, Warsaw, Madrid, Munich and Rome.

FREMONT, Calif.—Live theater got its own taste of a live broadcast production in the Tony Award-winning production of “Network” on Broadway with the help of Blackmagic Design. Video designer and cinematographer Tal Yarden used Blakcmagic’s Micro Studio Camera 4Ks, Studio Camera 4Ks, Video Assist 4K monitor/recorders, ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K and ATEM 1 M/E Advanced Panel both on and off stage to create the show’s very own live newscast depicting anchorman Howard Beale’s breakdown.

An adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Academy Award-winning film of the same name, the Broadway version of “Network” (directed by Ivo van Hove and adapted by Lee Hall) takes place entirely in Beale’s TV studio, which thanks to the Blackmagic equipment was able to operate like a real-life studio, with cast and crew operating the equipment on and off stage to power the newsroom and feed content to onstage screens.

To do this, the Micro Studio Camera 4Ks were installed in handheld rigs with Video Assist 4Ks and wireless transmitters, while the Studio Camera 4Ks were mounted on tripods and used teleprompters during Beale’s (played by Bryan Cranston) newscasts. Cameras were also used to capture a scene that begins outside the theater on the street and then works its way inside to the stage; the scene was filmed live for each performance.

Actors who had some camera experience were responsible for handling the cameras on stage during the production.

Some of the crew who operated the ATEM switchers were also on stage during each performance. While the ATEM 2 M/E switcher operated from a rack underneath the stage, the ATEM 1 M/E was a part of the stage and used by an onstage operator. The onstage operator had to monitor the cameras, as well as followed the script for multiple ATEM cues, recalled presets on the matrix router and switched video feeds from the cameras to multiple onstage screens.

The Broadway run for “Network” came to close on in June of this year.

Networks are complex systems characterized by large numbers of heterogeneous components and a high degree of interconnections among them, but a new methodology could help reduce these complexities.

The “Viable system of networking” (VSON) utilizes cybernetics to manage networking complexity. Similar to the viable system model (VSM) of organizations, VSON can be used as a conceptual and functional tool to design a viable networking system.

COEXIST AND CO-EVOLVE

Networks don’t exist in a vacuum—in order to be viable, they need to coexist and co-evolve with their environment. VSON consists of four basic units (Fig. 1):

• Environment
• Operation
• Management
• Boundary

The operation and management of a network interact with Environment. A viable network must be secure to be able to defend its Boundary from a hostile Environment. Separating Operation and Management in networks reduces Environment complexity at the Management level.

In the VSON, the complexity of the Environment is always larger than the complexity of the network, and the complexity of the network is always larger than the complexity of Management. Based on these relationships, complexity of Environment can be managed using three strategies: policies, variety engineering and recursion.

Policies specify goals, therefore network complexity is reduced to relevant complexity defined by the goals, and Environment is reduced to Relevant Environment, which is much less complex than the Environment as a whole.

Variety engineering manages complexity by attenuating unwanted varieties and amplifying requisite varieties. Placing a firewall at the Boundary to block security threats is an example of attenuation. An example of variety amplification is to increase services and capacities in Operation. Maintaining Control at the Management level to keep Operation in line with the goals is an example of mixed attenuation and amplification.

Recursion utilizes fractal structure to manage complexity of large networks. A fractal structure is self-similar across different scales: viable systems are made up of viable systems (Fig. 1). Each viable system manages its share of the total complexity that VSON has to manage. At the same time, the services of these viable systems must be controlled in order to contribute to the goals of VSON as a whole.

Similar to but not the same as VSM, VSON has six components (Fig. 1):

• Operation
• Orchestration
• Control
• Monitoring
• Intelligence
• Policy

VSON uses Operation, Orchestration, Control and Monitoring to realize its goals and Control, Monitoring, Intelligence and Policy to adapt them. Each of the services in Operation is a viable system, has its own goals, own Relevant Environment, own Operation and own Management. These services share some common resources, and may contribute to the same goals, therefore, Orchestration is needed to ensure that services don’t conflict with one another.

Operation and Orchestration are necessary but not sufficient for VSON, because each service can still pursue its own goals without contributing to the system as a whole; therefore, Control and Monitoring are needed. Through Control, the goals of VSON are translated into goals for the services in Operation and through Monitoring, quality, efficiency, security and reliability of services are guaranteed. Operation, Orchestration, Control and Monitoring are necessary as a cohesive whole to realize VSON goals, but they are not enough to make VSON viable. Intelligence analyzes information from both outside Future Environment and inside Monitoring feedback (via Control) to find patterns and predict trends and recommends new ways to adapt to Policy. By defining goals and coordinating the interaction between Control and Intelligence, Policy determines the identity of VSON and the ability to adapt. These six components, together with communications among them, are necessary and sufficient for VSON.

One example of VSON is software defined networking (SDN) where Policy, Control and Operation are similar to the Application, Control and Data layers in SDN. However, the Management and Hardware layer supporting VSON can be anything from SDN to legacy networking, or a combination of both.

In fact, networking in VSON is so broad that it covers, for example, social networks and knowledge networks as well. Embedded in the recursive structure of VSON, but absent in SDN, are the concepts of “Divide and Conquer” and subsidiarity. The Divide and Conquer strategy breaks a problem down into two or more sub-problems recursively to manage scale up complexity. The principle of subsidiarity resolves problems as close as possible to where they occur, and only pass along decisions elsewhere when it really needs to do so. Due to lack of Intelligence, SDN only has adaptability through programming.

Ling Ling Sun is the CTO for Nebraska Public TV. Many thanks to Tom Butts for help in editing this article.

ProMax Systems sees demand for NDI support growing among its customers as the IP replacement for SDI and has responded with a new product to control recording of NDI streams to shared storage and even perform frame-accurate cuts, without tying up a workstation or unnecessarily burdening a facility’s network.

As a supplier of advanced shared storage solutions for those creating film and video content, ProMax has tracked the rise of interest in NDI among the creative community for the past few years.

Some customers of ProMax, which offers an integrated, turnkey shared storage solution with asset management, backup and archiving software, have begun asking, in Cooper’s words, “for proper media management within an NDI environment.”

In response, the company recently released a beta version of its new NDI Previewer software and expects to offer a market-ready version within three months, says ProMax COO Nathaniel Cooper. To put the new product into perspective, Cooper compares NDI Previewer to NewTek’s Isocorder, an application for ISO capture of IP video sources via NDI.

“With [NewTek’s] Isocorder Pro, you can through a workstation record an incoming feed to shared storage,” he says.m“That’s not a bad way to do it, but it eats up a workstation and that workstation’s resources,” Cooper explains.

There’s also a downside from a network perspective. “It creates about double the traffic. What is happening is NDI traffic is passing through the network to the workstation, which captures the data and passing it back through the network to shared storage,” says Cooper.

With NDI Previewer, it’s possible to preview NDI streams, trigger records to ProMax shared storage and even use the Chop feature to do frame-accurate cuts in a file to give editors immediate access to content without tying up the processor cycles of an expensive workstation or creating extra network traffic.

“None of that traffic is actually going through the workstation itself,” explains Cooper. “It’s a clever thing we can do now that NDI exists.” It’s even possible to run NDI Previewer on a laptop connected to a network via Wi-Fi or from home on a laptop connected via a VPN, adds Coopers.

NDI Previewer is a gateway to the other features offered by ProMax’ shared storage solution, such as automatic capture of feeds, automatic backup, automatic file replication and automatic addition of metadata tags to power future asset management and searches.

“There’s a whole media management ecosystem we’ve created,” says Cooper. “Once you start piping files into that, it’s now utilizing all of that media management capability.”

The company chief operating officer adds that ProMax has had “a very good experience” working with NewTek’s “well-organized team” and credits the strong documentation provided in NewTek’s NDI software development kit (SDK) with making NDI Previewer development relatively fast and easy.

(Editor’s note: This is the first in a continuing series of @NDICentral blogs. We welcome your comments and active discussion.)

NEW YORK—As broadcasters increasingly move toward IP-based systems within their facilities and for wide area network connections, the ability to prioritize some packets over others is becoming more desirable.

One popular method for doing this is called Differentiated Services or “DiffServ,” which uses a data field within the IPv4 (and IPv6) packet header. Several standards have been produced that take advantage of this functionality for video and audio applications, including the AES67 standard for high-performance IP audio streaming interoperability that was published in 2013.

Already, many systems can implement DiffServ, but effective network management may require some thought about which flows to prioritize and how to treat different forms of traffic. Since there are no hard and fast rules about which packet streams have to be given priority over other streams, only guidelines, broadcasters need to make an informed decision about how to configure their priority schemes to suit their particular needs.

Fig. 1: Comparison of ToS and DiffServ fields

LABELING THE PACKETS
In the original version of the IPv4 specification (IETF RFC 791), eight bits of the packet header were reserved for a function called “Type of Service” or ToS. Packets with a higher value in the first three bits of this field (see Fig. 1) were given precedence over other packets, allowing them to be given seven different levels of priority for congested resources such as a limited-capacity data path between two routers. The remaining five bits were originally designated for three flags that could be used to give more information about the flow, and the last two bits were reserved for future use in the original standard. Note that a fourth flag bit was added in the later RFC 1349 in place of one of the reserved bits.

DiffServ was defined in RFC 2474, which was published in 1998, and has been modified slightly since then. In place of the three-bit priority field and three one-bit flags defined in RFC 791, DiffServ uses six bits for defining up to 64 possible Differentiated Services Code Points, or DSCPs. Each of the codes can be used to define a specific priority level for a group of packet flows within the network.

All packets that are labeled with a given code point are given the same priority and treated the same by nodes in the network. This so-called “coarse-grained” mechanism provides a straightforward means to prioritize packets at each hop along a network, thereby creating a prioritized end-to-end system.

GIVING PRIORITY
DiffServ behavior within a network is based on classifying and labeling packets into groups (also known as Behavior Aggregates or “BA”), which can be treated as equals when they are sent between nodes along a network path. For each connection between a pair of network nodes, Per Hop Behaviors (PHB) are configured for each of the different BAs (priority groups). Different amounts of bandwidth, different queue sizes, different ways to deal with oversub-scription and other packet processing functions can be specified for each PHB.

Several different PHBs have been defined in the DiffServ standard:

The Default Forwarding (DF) or “Best Effort” code point is used for packets that do not require any specific level of priority, and are given a DSCP of 000000, which is a decimal value of 0. These packets will be given the lowest available priority.

Expedited Forwarding (EF) as defined in RFC 3246 code point should be reserved for packet streams that require very high performance, with low levels of loss, jitter and latency, along with assured bandwidth. In normal enterprise networks, this code point might be used for Voice over IP (VoIP), to minimize the latency and jitter of these signals that might occupy only a small fraction of the overall network bandwidth. However, in media facility networks, since most of the network bandwidth will be occupied by video and audio signals, AES67 recommends using the EF code point only for IEEE-1588 Precision Timing Protocol (PTP) messages. EF packets are given a DSCP of 101110, which is a decimal value of 46.

Fig. 2: DiffServ code points for assured forwarding

Assured Forwarding (AF) as defined in RFC 2597 provides a dozen different code points for assigning priority levels to various BAs. There are four classes (1 through 4), each of which has three drop precedence levels (Low (1), Medium (2) and High (3), where High Precedence packets are more likely to be dropped), and are shown in Fig. 2. Each of the four classes should be given a defined amount of buffer space and output interface bandwidth for each network hop. For audio packets, AES67 recommends using the AF41 DSCP of 100010, which is a decimal value of 34. This is the highest class of forwarding with the lowest probability of having packets dropped within AF.

Class Selectors(CS) of 1 through 7 are also defined in RFC 2474; these simply use the first three bits of the DSCP field to contain the binary values 1 through 7, with the remaining three bits in the DSCP set to 000.

This ability to configure how each hop through the network handles the different priority levels provides one of the largest benefits of DiffServ. This technology removes the need for endpoint devices to issue reservation requests for paths with specific amounts of bandwidth through a network and eliminates complex management systems and databases at each network node to track the priorities and bandwidth requirements of thousands of streams that pass through them.

The result is a priority mechanism that can scale up to cover a large, distributed network without requiring centralized control or complex communications between network nodes.

If you are wondering about the last two bits of the Differentiated Services field, those have now been designated for Explicit Congestion Notification, which will have to be a subject for a future column.

Wes Simpson wishes that all of his Internet traffic could be given the highest priority. He can be reached atwes.simpson@gmail.com.

The future for video, IP and storage have at least one common foundation amongst them: Ethernet networking. Recent changes and future roadmaps for networking and storage systems are, without a doubt, about to alter the architectures of data-and-media storage as well as video transport in short order. We’ll look at some of these changes, both historically and in future tense, to provide some vision for what you should prepare for.

In the start-up days of Ethernet—around the early to mid-1980s—the strategy of “if you build it, they will come” propelled Ethernet’s development from a data-rate (ie., speed) perspective. In those days, if the storage community needed faster Ethernet, it was usually ready and waiting.

The novelty of PC computing extended to those who could afford the various components of the PC, including storage, network interfaces and memory. Storage networking was in its infancy and used only by those who needed shared data on a broader scale vs. in a PC workstationonly environment.

The cost to update or modify the infrastructure to support Ethernet was still relatively expensive; thus, major changes to networks were often delayed and were based upon the need and economics associated with those modifications.

The increases in speed for storage media weren’t occurring particularly fast either. Until the early 2000s, the significant changes in spinning media yielded only modest overall throughput improvements: faster and more reliable mechanics, rotational speed increases and reductions in latency. The big differences came in raw storage capacities, which increased many-fold from the early uses of rotating magnetic media. Ethernet, except for network transport, had little impact on storage systems as a whole.

Then, circa 2010, Flash memory as cache emerged to further improve the overall spinning-disk storage equation. As previous TV Technology articles have demonstrated, Flash dramatically improves storage system IOPS. And it doesn’t take a lot of Flash to make a significant difference in overall storage system improvements. Studies have shown that by adding as little Flash as 1 percent of the total storage capacity, in a tiered form, can yield increases in IOPS of 25 percent or more. Furthermore, as 3D NAND (Flash) was incorporated into SSDs, the cost/benefit ratio skyrocketed in many dimensions.

Fig. 1: Common Ethernet speed rates (link speeds) show current, in development and future standards with their dates of implementation. In the past, networking generally stayed ahead of other supporting system technologies, including storage. As storage systems have evolved, networking may now actually be lagging behind the storage (SSD) performance side, despite the fact more than a billion ports of Ethernet have shipped to enterprise, residential, data centers and industrial users.

Enterprise class SSDs, available today, can do sequential reads at around 2.8 GBps (22.4 Gbps). Essentially, this is faster than what a 10 GbE adaptor can support by a two times factor. It’s not difficult to see that in short order even 10 GbE network infrastructures will lag in performance to the level that storage throughput and/or system processing on network attached storage could be seriously affected; especially given the fact that 1 GbE has only recently peaked in terms of the total number of port shipments actually sold through this year.

As for 10 GbE, it is becoming cheaper and far more prevalent than it was two to three years ago. We’ve had 100 GbE since 2010, yet the 100 GbE growth rate remains much lower than 10 GbE is today. That said, 10 GbE is expected to reach saturation (peak port shipments) somewhere around 2018. By that time even faster mid-speeds (e.g., 25 GbE and 40 GbE) are expected to become common, and probably necessary for video systems where the transport shifts from SDI-for-video to IP-for-video (Fig. 1).

This gives rise to some serious considerations into how video and broadcast facilities will need to plan, network infrastructure wise, for the inevitable paradigm shift to IP.

NOT JUST FASTER
Putting the future for IP video aside, “Big Data” storage and the networking of that data is still predicted to increase by 50 percent a year. Once we seriously begin to pump video over IP, that number is surely to expand and possibly be incalculable by the 2017–2018 timeframe. Therefore, the perspective on network speed won’t be “how fast is your network,” but instead may be “how much more networking will you need?”

Not unlike what we’re finding for higher resolution video (UHD/4K)—“more, faster and better” pixels—is the question regarding storage networking solutions now “more, faster and broader” networks? Some, such as the Ethernet Alliance, believe that is the case and are in turn making a much stronger argument for addressing network improvement development.

The firestorm that is happening depicts an Ethernet ecosystem expanding by the second. Adding fuel to that fire, discussions are underway related to new direct connect 2.5 GbE and 5 GbE interfaces for HDDs. This, in part, appears necessary in order to address huge media storage systems, such as at Facebook, where billions of pictures and videos are now being housed on Ethernet-connected storage platforms. In addition, 2.5 Gig, 2.5 GigbaseT and 5 GigbaseT will allow existing Cat5e and Cat6 outlets to support new 802.11ac WiFi technologies; revitalizing cabling infrastructures in place worldwide.

The Ethernet roadmap has objectives for 400 GbE; with 100 Gb-single lane and Terabit Ethernet (TbE) as possible future speeds further on the horizon.

The reality of these higher-speed networks won’t become clear until the industry has reached a successful implementation of the 400 GbE and 100 Gb-single lane systems. Not forgetting that the products necessary to support IP-video must also include multiterabit fabrics in order to switch the 10-to-20 Gb full bandwidth (or even lightly compressed) signals for UHD/4K and beyond.

PARITY ACHIEVED
Some say that parity in SSDs and HDDs will be achieved somewhere in 2016; meaning the cost and capacities of the devices will be essentially equal. This will certainly change the landscape of storage systems forever going forward. As for networking, including Ethernet, this won’t be reaching that kind of parity for some time.

To the visionaries of tomorrow, keep these perspectives in mind as you plan your next “big” network system update; or as you consider the move towards an all-IP infrastructure.

Note: The author wishes to acknowledge appreciation to SNIA (www.snia.org) and the Ethernet Alliance (www.ethernetalliance.org) for providing background and statistics used in this article.

Karl Paulsen, CPBE, is a SMPTE Fellow and chief technology officer at Diversified Systems. Read more about this and other storage topics in his book “Moving Media Storage Technologies.” You can contact him atkpaulsen@divsystems.com.