Hands-on Troubleshooting IPTV Inside The Head-end

TV Head-ends are migrating to high speed IP structures for delivery of digital encoded real-time live content. Ethernet and IP packet based services are replacing SDI and synchronous connections. The new technologies pose different challenges to delivering reliable services and require different troubleshooting skills. Finding and correcting problems in a service requires analytic skills which can be learnt from experience and can be developed by the structured approach to troubleshooting.

Services can only be delivered reliably if the underlying network resources have been provided. Ethernet and routed IP are statistical datagram technologies so reliable services can only be delivered through well designed network configurations. Even then end to end delay will not be constant and can only be accurately calculated by understanding the queuing and statistical variation in the resulting transmission services. This requires an understanding of sizing statistical confidence intervals and how to verify service delay with management tools.

This course will provide a structured approach to troubleshooting IP based video delivery services. It will teach in depth analysis the key protocols found in IPTV Head-ends. Identifying interconnection problems between in-house devices and linking to external delivery sites will be addressed. It will also describe how to calculate confidence intervals of delay through service elements and queuing in order to allow engineers to design systems matching operational requirements and verify their operation when in operation.

This course is intended for engineers, service designers, developers, systems engineers and troubleshooting technicians involved in the development and support for IPTV Head-ends.

Hands-on exercises will use Windows based PCs or laptops deploying protocol analysers to detect and troubleshoot faults and observe the performance of IPTV Head-end systems Exercises will be run over an in class LANs deploying a network fault simulator to test performance and troubleshoot real faults. Attendees will be given an opportunity to connect their own Windows laptop in order to run the hands-on exercises.