Triple Play / IPTV Services Testing
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An effective method of testing IPTV and Triple Play is to build, test & measure on a 'Per Client / Per flow' basis with several unique individual voice, video & application data clients behind each residential gateway. |
Some key steps in testing IPTV with diversifEye are outlined here:
environments). In some networks part of the overall security will include authentication such as establishing DHCP sessions on a per client basis with external DCHP servers. 
An effective test in diversifEye for IPTV over triple play environments includes emulating multiple individual clients inside multiple individual VLANs (with priority bits enabled), in addition diversifEye has the ability of double VLAN tagging.diversifEye emulates client and server side. Users may test individual voice, video & application data clients against diversifEye voice, video & application data servers. But more importantly users may run the individual voice, video & application data clients against actual deployed serversthrough the network. This demonstrates real world performance & QoS as the clients are interacting with the real thing.
diversifEye enables scale testing, as a further step in understanding individual client QoE emulate surges in usage by adding individual clients into the environment in real time, without stopping the test. Ultimately measure the effect of one client on another client on the same Residential Gateway / across multiple Residential Gateways.
Some specific reasoning behind the need to test such tests include:
- What happens when two IPTV STB are on the same channel and one IPTV STB changes channel? Is there any effect on the IPTV STB that does not change channel?
- What happens when you have both IGMP V2 and IGMP V3 STB in the same household? What is the performance difference between these IPTV STB?
diversifEye measures IPTV STB's; leave, join latency, zap rate & other performance metrics on a per client basis for each set top box (STB), plus scales to realistic home scenarios of multiple IPTV STB per residential gateway / household.
Use diversifEye to determine the maximum channel zap loads in relation to the IPTV STB and IP network, this test scenario includes emulating IPTV STBs leaving the IPTV channel immediately after the join.
After establishing the effective IPTV performance QoE results on a per flow basis, use diversifEye to create client variability to match real world use of voice, video & application data services.
Further advance IPTV performance by mitigating against security attacks, use diversifEye to run both regular (HTTP, IGMP, POP3, SMTP etc) application flows and disruptive flows (P2P, DDOS, spam, viruses). Include real documents for email, URLs, attachments for realistic, per client web traffic flows, spam, viruses etc.
To future proof the network and technology advance testing by mixing IPv4 and IPv6 application flows.
IPTV/Triple Play Test Scenarios
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IPTV Video Quality - Emulate and analyze a home user's multiple IPTV video streams on a per channel basis with perceptual video quality MOS (Mean Opinion Score) method such as ITU J.144 IP derivative analysis. Determine additional video quality parameters such as blockiness/bluriness.
IPTV IGMP Channel Zap Rate Performance - Emulate an IPTV home user's channel change delay time. Determine on a per viewer basis the length ot time that a typical viewer will experience blank screen during busy hours or channel change surge during a major TV event.
Mixed Triple Play (IPTV, VoD, VoIP and Data Applications) Performance - Emulate and analyze the effect of high VoIP call rates and the cause effect of other high bandwidth applications such as P2P traffic. Test effect of triple play applications on VoIP call integrity if bandwidth saturation occurs.
Triple Play Security Attacks - Analyse the impact of DDoS/virus/worm attacks on delay sensitive IP Video, VoIP and data applications.
Discover more about IGMP in our white paper Performance Testing Triple Play - IGMP IPTV Services.
