The Lippis Report

There are multiple forms of IP video including real-time and non-real-time. Non-real-time or stored IP video is increasingly searched and consumed via browsers, smartphone/Iphone plug-ins such as Apple's QuickTime or Microsoft's Windows Media Player. As for real-time video applications, there are a range of business functions and usage scenarios which drive their use. Business functions include corporate communications, customer and consumer communications and business operations. Usage scenarios may include company messaging, team collaboration, training, marketing and advertising, collaboration support, presentation delivery, physical safety and security as well as sales and customer satisfaction. To address these functions and scenarios the following IP video communication applications are often put to work:

TelePresence: A high-end video and audio experience delivered through a dedicated TelePresence conference room usually equipped with one to three 1080p plasma monitors, location sensitive audio, comfortable office furniture and easy conference set-up, normally with the dialing of a number or click of a TelePresense room from a list of available rooms. Typical bandwidth per session is approximately 15Mbs.

Video Conferencing: Traditional videoconference rooms, but updated with IP-based LAN connections versus ISDN or T1. Typical bandwidth per session is hundreds of kilobits per second.

Digital Signage: Used predominately in the retail industry to educate customers and prospects about products and services. The content displayed on digital signage screens can range from simple text and still images to full-motion video, with or without audio. Digital signage with real-time IP videoconferencing is increasingly available where customers in retail branch offices can discuss products and services with knowledgeable executives located in distant headquarter or regional facilities, increasing expertise and knowledgeable personnel in retail branch offices.

Note that digital signage drives up campus IP video as its content source distributed through retail and branch offices is in data centers and campus networks. This content flows from campus networks out to branch offices. Further, digital signage is also being deployed around campuses after business and IT leaders realize that it's easy to deploy signage around campuses and meeting rooms.

Desktop Video: Predominately a software solution with webcam or higher quality video camera for personal IP videoconferencing enabling collaboration and ad hoc communications. Increased integration with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), UC presence and directory plus low cost high-definition cameras make this form of real-time video increasingly favorable to corporate users. Typical bandwidth per session is hundreds of Kbs to Mbs.

Video Telephony: Telephony provided videoconference service, which leverages existing PBX or IP telephony platforms to deliver IP video service. Typical bandwidth per session is tens to hundreds of Kbs.

IP Surveillance: An IP-based system of cameras configured, managed, viewed and controlled via stream management. Cameras connect to the IP network via wired or wireless Ethernet, utilize Power over Ethernet (PoE) and may be motion-triggered. Typical bandwidth per session is hundreds of Kbs to Mbs.

IP Video Contact Center: Adding IP video to contact centers offers another level of customer experience. Not only are corporations able to communicate with customers via live video, but certain population groups such as the hearing impaired can benefit significantly when IP video is added to contact center operations. For example, offering the hearing impaired access to highly qualified sign language interpreters so they may communicate with their local authorities and other public sector organizations, as SignVideo has done in Britain, provides access for the hearing impaired not previously available.

IP Video On Demand: The storage and retrieval of video streamed to end-points.

IP Video Broadcast: Used for real-time training and executive communications to a large percentage of employees simultaneously. End-points are software-based allowing employees to view the broadcast at the desktop, laptop or on smartphone/iPhone.

The two dominant IP video applications corporations are consuming are on demand training and videoconferencing. This is where the bulk of IP video traffic stems from. What's interesting about these applications is they possess different traffic flows. For example, an executive broadcast meeting spawns multicast sessions establishing a major streaming event on the network where employees are logging into one source simultaneously. Concurrently, IP video on demand training usually spawns a unicast flow, which has different characteristics to broadcast. Then there may be a series of IP videoconferencing sessions that spawn more multicast and/or unicast sessions. All of this interactive traffic is latency critical and layered on top of existing voice and data traffic patterns creating uncertainty as to scale, security and the network's ability to support the new load.

IP Video's Impact on IT infrastructure

Corporate operations are entering a period of video consumption never experienced before. As mentioned above, IP video will enable a wide range of new video services to all employees, partners, suppliers and customers. Some of the IP video applications discussed above will be procured from executive management while others will be line of business and even procured at the individual employee level. Partners, suppliers and customers will require IP video links or the use of collaboration applications, which support IP video services. Depending upon the actions of business and IT leaders, IP video can either be a destructive "œperfect storm" or a benevolent wave of increased corporate productivity and expense reduction.

IP video will drive up demand for most IT infrastructure components. Clearly increased network bandwidth will contribute to improved quality of the IP video experience. But bandwidth alone will not be sufficient to prepare for IP video. Congestion management and avoidance services need to keep voice, video and data logically separate to ensure application performance needs are met. New network services which auto-configure network infrastructure devices need to support real-time IP video flows or communicate to users that network resources are not available for their requested video session(s). Network access and security needs to be assessed to ensure IP video receipts are authorized to receive video streams and view on-demand content while third parties are not intercepting video sessions. IP video delivery will need to be wide including desktops, laptops, IP phones and mobile end-points to address most corporate and government needs. Interoperability standards and approaches between vendor IP video offerings as well as between legacy, non-IP video and IP video services need to be included in an architectural approach to IP video planning. Storage requirements will increase, as large video files are stored for on-demand consumption. Planning for the above will treat IP video as a benevolent wave.

Dangers Due to Lack of Planning

If you're spending time planning to stop employees from watching YouTube, the NBA finales or tweaking TelePresence, then you're not planning for IP video and it will more than likely be a destructive perfect storm. Much investment has been made in application and content delivery infrastructure within the enterprise and government markets to ensure application performance remains high. Ignoring the IP video perfect storm will degrade and disrupt application performance, UC flows and slow down business process at best. Without planning some IT leaders may be forced to ban certain types of video applications in an effort to maintain existing application performance levels. If the network does not scale, then IT leaders will be confronted with performance losses which will drive a knee jerk reaction to unplanned and costly upgrades to meet increased network resource demands, creating the worst case scenario: degraded application and business performance, unable to support IP video applications and increased network cost. In this scenario business and IT leaders run the risk of lost opportunities through productivity gains obtained by video success; that is exploiting training, collaboration, corporate communication and all the other benefits identified above.
Network and security planning are equally important to ensure IP video success. If IT security practices do not control video access then corporations run the risk of increased problems with intellectual property production and compliance issues as well. Mr. Marcus Bost, CIO of Adena Health Systems possessed the insight to scale up its corporate network and plan for IP video so when TeleMedicine was ready so too was Adena Health System.

Corporate Networking Attributes To Support IP Video

The amount of exposure the business community has to IP video has grown tremendously over the last two to three years. From the list of IP video applications above there is TelePresence on the high end and video on demand on the low end. In between these two, there is surveillance, of which all campuses have some form and which is usually analog and isolated from the IP network. But as surveillance is upgraded to IP, it can be integrated and collapsed into a single, intelligent IP network. There is also a significant rise in digital signage, which is reasonably inexpensive, even if it's not broadly used. The barrier of entry is low making it very easy to deploy a couple of signs, which allow many companies to afford experimenting with different applications. In reality there are four main yet different types of IP video being used in businesses today: 1) videoconferencing; 2) on-demand; 3) IP surveillance; and 4) digital signage.

Each of these video sources have different traffic pattern characteristics, which are mixed or overlaid on top of existing voice and business application traffic patterns. In short, IP networks support UC flows, client-server flows, datacenter flows, web 2.0 and now an astonishingly large number of multicast and unicast traffic patterns creating a matrix of logical flows within one physical IP network. This new set of traffic dynamics needs to be managed and allocated differently to scale than in the past.

Without the right network tools and services, network complexity will increase much more rapidly than the industry can manage. The first challenge for IT leaders to address is developing a plan to control IP video to ensure that it doesn't overrun the enterprise network and to maintain the user experience. In short, IT leaders need to manage and optimize flows.

To support IP video on corporate networks so that business may exploit its benefits and value, the enterprise networks need to possess the following attributes:

Attribute One: Ability to scale. Corporate networks need to be able to scale up bandwidth in the edge, distribution, core and wide area. With favorable LAN/WLAN and WAN bandwidth pricing and options, business and IT leaders will find actuating bandwidth scale a straightforward task.

Attribute Two: Video Management. Network infrastructure devices such as Ethernet switches, routers, WLAN controllers, access points, appliances, etc., need to offer management features to support IP video services residing on top of a converged network which offer visibility, monitoring and management of video flows so that network operations may modify configurations to optimize traffic flows.

Attribute Three: Video Availability. Network infrastructure needs to be highly available and its devices need to ensure IP video availability and controls to configure different quality of experience parameters.

Attribute Four: Isolating Video Streams. The corporate network needs to be able to isolate video streams to authorized users and groups. Security on any network is important, but executive level communications adds more weight. For IP surveillance, not all employees should have access to what's streaming through security cameras. Therefore, separating and isolating video traffic through network virtualization technologies becomes an important tool.

Attribute Five: IP Video Traffic Management. The corporate network needs to be able to identify and properly prioritize IP video traffic streams without negatively impacting other network services and applications.

Attribute Six: Secure IP Video. The corporate network needs to maintain privacy through transport encryption.

Attribute Seven: Media Independent and Aware IP Video. The corporate network needs to support multiple media options for the transport and delivery of IP video streams. In particular integrating IP video over wired, wireless and mobile networks is important especially as WLAN and mobile end-points define the mobile enterprise, which will represent a growing share of total network end-points over the next several business cycles.

Soon an intelligent network will be able to identify what type of device is connected to it; this is particularly important for wireless mobility. For example, when a Wi-Fi phone is connected to the network, the network could identify that very low-resolution video is preferred as opposed to the high-definition video that would be streamed to a TelePresence room. The networked platform over time will simplify what types of video assets are to be streamed to which people and which devices.
The next Lippis Report on IP Video will detail how to develop an IP video architecture for your network with guidance around security, scale and optimization. We'll end with some guiding principles.