* The parallels between IPV and VoIP/IP Telephony
Today, we’ll focus again on video over IP (or what we call IPV) based on a recent discussion with Psytechnics about the deployment parallels we find between IPV and VoIP/IP Telephony. Psytechnics VP Marketing Joe Frost shared his thoughts on why VoIP and IPV should be managed on the same platform using common tools and evaluative metrics like MOS (Mean Opinion Score), along with some of the challenges in a common approach to session management.
Before we begin, we’ll remind our readers that a MOS assigns a numerical value to the human experience for multimedia so, for example, a VoIP call rating with a MOS of 1 suggests that call quality is very bad while a MOS of 5 is assigned the best possible VoIP call quality. ITU-T Recommendation P.800 has the full details on “ Methods for subjective determination of transmission quality”.
Psytechnics has been a leader in helping to define and deploy MOS tools, and according to Frost, “as the enterprise moves more toward video to communicate, managing video call quality becomes an issue. They want to use the same platform to manage VoIP and video, but excellent VoIP call quality is already managed on another system.” The Psytechnics approach is to use what they term as “IP MOS” that consolidates where possible the approach to voice and video call quality.
Although, as Frost points out, “we can’t monitor video frames like we do voice frames because they are too long, too complicated,” and the computing power needed to provide real-time analysis would be “too expensive.” There are some common grounds for measuring and reacting to a video session based on existing network management techniques. For example Psytechnics has built its Experience Manager” platform by first bringing people into a lab environment, asking them to watch and listen to video delivered over a variety of codecs, then providing scores based on the users’ experiences. With this approach, Psytechnics can evaluate whether or not an edge device can mask a transmission problem and then task network management techniques to appropriately correct (or not correct) a problem based on the user “IP MOS” score.Our observations: We agree that IPV provides network management challenges that are exponentially more complex to manage than VoIP/IP Telephony, but we think this approach “IP MOS” makes sense. And if a company can provide a platform that manages IPV and VoIP equally well, it may be worth investigating and deploying a common platform. After all, it is a rare enterprise network indeed if the voice and video sessions travel across two completely different environments.
Out thanks to Psytechnics to introducing this topic – we’re sure to cover this more thoroughly in future editions. As with all our newsletters, we welcome you to share your thoughts on this issue and approach – you can click on our contact links at the top of this article to send us an e-mail or comment on the blog shown below.
