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Video: ST-2110 – Measuring and Testing the Data, Control and Timing Planes

Posted on 15th December 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

An informal chat touching on the newest work around SMPTE ST-2110 standards and related specifications in today’s video. The industry’s leading projects are now tracking the best practices in IT as much as the latest technology in IP because simply getting video working over the network isn’t enough. Broadcasters demand solutions which are secure from the ground up, easy to deploy and have nuanced options for deployment.

Andy Rayner from Nevion talks to Prin Boon from Phabrix to understand the latest trends. Between then, Andy and Prin account for a lot of activity in standards work within standards and industry bodies such as SMPTE, VSF and JT-NM to name a but a few, so whom better to hear from regarding the latest thinking and ongoing work.

Andy starts by outlining the context of SMPTE’s ST-2110 suite of standards which covers not only the standards within 2110, but also the NMOS specifications from AMWA as well as the timing standards (SMPTE 2059 and IEEE 1588). Prin and Andy both agree that the initial benefit of moving to IT networking was benefiting from the massive network switches which now delivering much higher switching density than SDI ever could or would, now the work of 2110 projects is also tracking IT, rather than simply IP. By benefiting from the best practices of the IT industry as a whole, the broadcast industry is getting a much better product. Andy makes the point that broadcast-uses have very much pushed fabric manufacturers to implement PTP and other network technologies in a much more mature and scalable way than was imagined before.

Link to video

The focus of conversation now moves to the data, control and timing plane. The data plane contains the media essences and all of the ST 21110 standards. Control is about the AMWA/NMOS specs such as the IS-0X specs as well as the security-focused BCP-003 and JT-NM TR-1001. Timing is about PTP and associated guidelines.

Prin explains that in-service test and measurement is there to give a feeling for the health of a system; how close to the edge is the system? This is about early alerting of engineering specialists and then enable deep faultfinding with hand-held 2110 analysers. Phabrix, owned by Leader, are one of a number of companies who are creating monitoring and measurement tools. In doing this Willem Vermost observed that little of the vendor data was aligned so couldn’t be compared. This has directly led to work between many vendors and broadcasters to standardise the reported measurement data in terms of how it’s measured and how it is named and is being standardised under 2110-25. This will cover latency, video timing, margin and RTP offset.

More new work discussed by the duo includes the recommended practice, RP 2059-15 which is related to the the ST 2059 standards which apply PTP to media streams. As PTP, also known as IEEE 1588 has been updated to version 2.1 as part of the 2019 update, this RP creates a unified framework to expose PTP data in a structured manner and relies on RFC 8575 which, itself, relies on the YANG data modeling language.

We also hear about work to ensure that NMOS can fully deal with SMPTE 2022-7 flows in all the cases where a receiver is expecting a single or dual feed. IS-08 corner cases have been addressed and an all-encompassing model to develop against has been created as a reference.

Pleasingly, as this video was released in December, we are treated to a live performance of a festive song on piano and trombone. Whilst this doesn’t progress the 2110 narrative, it is welcomed as a great excuse to have a mine pie.

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Speakers

	Andy Rayner Chief Technologist, Nevion
	Prinyar Boon Product Manager, PHABRIX

Video: Proper Network Designs and Considerations for SMPTE ST-2110

Posted on 14th December 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Networks from SMPTE ST 2110 systems can be fairly simple, but the simplicity achieved hides a whole heap of careful considerations. By asking the right questions at the outset, a flexible, scalable network can be built with relative ease.

“No two networks are the same” cautions Robert Welch from Arista as he introduces the questions he asks at the beginning of the designs for a network to carry professional media such as uncompressed audio and video. His thinking focusses on the network interfaces (NICs) of the devices: How many are there? Which receive PTP? Which are for management and how do you want out-of-band/ILO access managed? All of these answers then feed into the workflows that are needed influencing how the rest of the network is created. The philosophy is to work backwards from the end-nodes that receive the network traffic.

Robert then shows how these answers influence the different networks at play. For resilience, it’s common to have two separate networks at work sending the same media to each end node. Each node then uses ST 2022-7 to find the packets it needs from both networks. This isn’t always possible as there are some devices which only have one interface or simply don’t have -7 support. Sometimes equipment has two management interfaces, so that can feed into the network design.

PTP is an essential service for professional media networks, so Robert discusses some aspects of implementation. When you have two networks delivering the same media simultaneously, they will both need PTP. For resilience, a network should operate with at least two Grand Masters – and usually, two is the best number. Ideally, your two media networks will have no connection between them except for PTP whereby the amber network can benefit from the PTP from the blue network’s grandmaster. Robert explains how to make this link a pure PTP-only link, stopping it from leaking other information between networks.

Multicast is a vital technology for 2110 media production, so Robert looks at its incarnation at both layer 2 and layer 3. With layer 2, multicast is handled using multicast MAC addresses. It works well with snooping and a querier except when it comes to scaling up to a large network or when using a number of switches. Robert explains that this because all multicast traffic needs to be sent through the rendez-vous point. If you would like more detail on this, check out Arista’s Gerard Phillips’ talk on network architecture.

Looking at JT-NM TR-1001, the guidelines outlining the best practices for deploying 2110 and associated technologies, Robert explains that multicast routing at layer 3 works much increases stability, enables resiliency and scalability. He also takes a close look at the difference between ‘all source’ multicasting supported by IGMP version 2 and the ability to filter for only specific sources using IGMP version 3.

Finishing off, Robert talks about the difficulties in scaling PTP since all the replies/requests go into the same multicast group which means that as the network scales, so does the traffic on that multicast group. This can be a problem for lower-end gear which needs to process and reject a lot of traffic.

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Speaker

Robert Welch
Technical Solutions Lead
Arista Networks

Video: Maximise your video density with ST 2110

Posted on 26th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

What can ST 2110 do for you? What problems can it solve? These questions and more are tackled in this video from BBright and Matrox.

Guillaume Arthuis from BBright kicks off the video by highlighting that SMPTE ST 2110 sends all media as separate streams. Called essences, all aspects of a signal are delivered separately such as metadata, audio and video. For a device which looks at subtitling, this saves having to receive a 3Gb/s stream just to get a few Kbps of data. Sending of the video has also been improved as no blanking data is sent which can see bandwidth savings of up to 30% depending on the video format. It shouldn’t be forgotten that network cables are bi-directional and typically can carry many streams. This means the number of cables in a facility can be greatly reduced.

Marwan al-Habbal from Matrox compares the pros and cons of SDI against ST 2110. SDI has incredible interoperability, has good reliability and ‘discovery’ is not really a problem since everything is point-to-point connected with uni-directional cabling. These latter two points are, of course, downsides compared to ST 2110. Marwan looks at whether we can be confident in 2110’s reliability, discovery and connectivity. Within the standard, ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ senders are specified. Marwan makes the point that using narrow senders everywhere will give better determinism and can avoid momentary ‘blips’ in the network. Any problems on the network can be mitigated by using ST 2022-7 seamless switching whereby two feeds are sent over the network(s) and a single stream is reassembled from the received packets. Testing is the key to interoperability. JT-NM’s testing programme is, by another name, a ‘plugfest’ whereas many vendors as possible connect to other vendors’ equipment in order to test compatibility. This is leading to confidence in terms of inter-vendor workflows being generally accessible.

Another major benefit of ST 2110 is density. Guillaume takes us through calculations showing that you can implement a 512×512 router using just a 1U switch at an approximate cost of $80. He also looks at future scaling approaches. One approach outlined is to use 25G interfaces today to leave room for expansion but the other is to implement JPEG XS running ST 2110-22. This is a relatively new standard which brings in the ability to use compressed video in 2110 for the first time. This would allow ‘HD’ bitrates for low-latency UHD streams.

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Speakers

	Guillaume Arthuis President, BBright
	Marwan Al-Habbal OEM Product Manager. Matrox

Video: Case Study: Dropbox HQ ST 2110

Posted on 18th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Dropbox is embedded in many production workflows – official and otherwise – so it’s a beautiful symmetry that they’re using Broadcast’s latest technology, SMPTE ST 2110, within their own headquarters. Dropbox have AV throughout their building and a desire to create professional video from anywhere. This desire was a driving factor in an IP-based production facility as, to allow mobile production platforms to move from room to room with only a single cable needed to connect to the wall and into the production infrastructure.

David Carroll’s integration company delivered this project and joins Wes Simpson to discuss this case-study with colleague Kevin Gross. David explains that they delivered fibre to seventy locations throughout the building making most places into potential production locations.

Being an IT company at heart, the ST 2110 network was built to perform in the traditional way, but with connections into the corporate network which many broadcasters wouldn’t allow. ST 2110 works best with two separate networks, often called Red and Blue, both delivering the same video. This uses ST 2022-7 to seamlessly failover if one network loses a packet or even if it stops working all together. This is the technique used with dropbox, although there these networks are connected together so are not one hundred per cent isolated. This link, however, has the benefit of allowing PTP traffic between the two networks.

PTP topology typically sees two grandmasters in the facility. It makes sense to connect one to the red network, the other to the blue. In order to have proper redundancy, though, there should really be a path from both grandmasters to both networks. This is usually done with a specially-configured ‘PTP only’ link between the two. In this case, there are other reasons for a wider link between networks which also serves as the PTP link. Another element of PTP topology is acknowledging the need for two PTP domains. A PTP domain allows two PTP systems to operate on the same network but without interfering with one another. Dante requires PTP version 1 whereas 2110, and most other things, require v2. Although this is in the process of improving, the typical way to solve this now is to run the two separately and block v1 from areas of the network in which it’s not needed.

PTP disruptions can also happen with multicast packet loss. If packets are lost at the wrong time, a grandmaster election can happen. Finally, on PTP, they also saw the benefits of using boundary clock switches to isolate the grandmasters. These grandmasters have to send out the time eight times a second. Each end-device then replies to ascertain the propagation delay. Dealing with every single device can overwhelm grandmasters, so boundary clock switches can be very helpful. On a four-core Arista, David and Kevin found that one core would be used dealing with the PTP requests.

A more extensive write-up of the project can be found here from David Carroll

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Speakers

	Kevin Gross Media Network Consultant AVA Networks
	David Carroll President, David Carroll Associates, Inc.
	Wes Simpson Owner, LearnIPVideo.com