Internet Video

The well-documented explosion in streaming over-the-top (OTT) video is placing broadband networks of all types under severe strain. Not only is this video traffic congesting broadband networks, its quality sensitive nature means that broadband subscribers can actually see the impact of congestion—most frequently in the form of a freeze in video playback caused by receive buffer underruns. And unfortunately for broadband service providers, even though they are not being paid for the content, they are the ones that frequently field calls from disgruntled viewers.

While OTT video providers have made improvements in the form of better compression, adaptive streaming, and progressive downloading, the quality of OTT video all too often fails to meet subscriber quality of experience (QoE) expectations. All of these techniques, while useful, suffer from the inherent variability in actual user throughput experienced over broadband networks. While this variability has little or no impact on conventional applications such as email and Web browsing, it can be debilitating to streaming applications such as OTT video.

What is needed is a way for the network to control OTT video (or any other high bandwidth application for that matter) and ensure that these flows continuously receive the optimal bandwidth allocation and that throughput variability is minimized.

Anagran Internet traffic managers (ITMs) are designed to do precisely that. Anagran ITMs provide all video flows with a constant bandwidth allocation, optimizing the performance of streaming algorithms and improving video QoE for subscribers. In the event that insufficient bandwidth is available to provide the optimal allocation, connection admission control (CAC) mechanisms can either disallow the session or force it to employ best effort bandwidth—in no case should a new video stream degrade a stream already in progress.

As can be seen in the figure below, simply snapping the Anagran ITM into existing networks results in improved and consistent video QoE.