Management of Digital Video Broadcasting services in open delivery platforms

The future of Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is moving towards solutions for efficient delivery of interactive IP multimedia services over DVB networks to handheld terminals. One of the most promising technologies is DVB-Handheld (DVB-H), at present under standardisation. Services deployed via this type of DVB technologies should enjoy reliability comparable to TV services and high quality standards. However, the market at present does not provide effective and economical solutions for the deployment of such services over multi-domain IP networks, due to their high level of unreliability. This paper focuses on service and network management for effective deployment of DVBH services. Experimental results are presented concerning QoS sensitivity to network performance of DVB-H services delivered over a multi-domain IP network. Moreover, a solution for efficient and cost effective service management via QoS monitoring and control and network SLA design is proposed, giving DVB-H operators the possibility of managing service QoS without being tied to third party operators.