Case Study: Resilient Backbone Design for IPTV Services

This paper presents a case study of designing resilient backbone network for supporting IPTV services within a single network provider. We first introduce the architecture and the characteristics of IPTV traffic. We then explore the design space in terms of IP versus optical technologies, huband-spoke versus meshed service layer topology, dual-homed versus ring access, use of multicast, routing, and fast failure restoration. From this design space, we propose a number of design instances and evaluate them according to the capital expense they incur. We demonstrate significant benefits of multicast in reducing capital expense for broadcast TV, illustrate that our particular switched optical network design requires less capital than the IP based designs, and show that ring access to the backbone is more attractive for broadcast TV, while dual-homed access being more attractive if we have high volume of realtime Video on Demand (VoD) traffic.