Análisis sobre la viabilidad y oportunidad del despliegue de Multicast Adaptive Bit Rate en la red de distribución de vídeo de una operadora

Abstract

Nowadays TV platforms over Internet (OTT and IPTV) are constantly growing due to their popularity. The networks in charge of serving OTT and IPTV content are known as CDNs (Content Delivery Network). The main functions of a CDN are to save transport resources, improve the efficiency when delivering content and increase the users QoE (Quality of Experience). This project focuses on those video services distributed through a non dedicated network (OTT) and it has been carried out in the video CDN of an operator. In the CDN analyzed the delivery of content is done through unicast; that is, the server that hosts the content delivers one copy for each client server. The main problem is that in a popular live event there may be thousands of users consuming the same content. However, delivering content through unicast implies a high consumption of transport resources and QoE gets worse, that is, unicast based delivery is not efficient. The objective of this project is to analyze multicast Adaptive Bit Rate (mABR) technology as a solution to the previous problem. The use of multicast implies that in the case of a popular live event, the server that hosts the content will only distribute one copy that will be duplicated by the routers in order to reach all the multicast receivers. On the other hand, the CDN analyzed delivers the content by using adaptive streaming protocols (ABR), for that reason the proposed technology is an extension of multicast in order to transport ABR video in an efficient way. The current situation of the operators CDN has been analyzed along this document, and the mABR solutions of different vendors have been studied. In addition, an economic model is proposed so as to assess the operator's profitability of acquiring a mABR solution and conclude which scenario brings more benefits. Finally, two integration scenarios of the mABR technology and the operator's CDN have been defined taking into account all the tradeoffs that have been described throughout the project.