Video: Transporting ST 2110 Over WAN

Is SMPTE ST 2110 suitable for inter-site connectivity over the WAN? As ST 2110 continues to mature and the first facilities are going live bringing 2110 into daily use, there are a number of challenges still to be overcome and moving a large number of essence flows long distances and between PTP time domains is one of them.

Nevion’s Andy Rayner presents the work the VSF is doing to recommend transport of ST 2110 over WAN outlining where they have got to and what has been recommended to date.

The talk starts with SMPTE 2022-7 seamless protection which is recommended for dealing with path breaks. For compensating for transmission errors, FEC is recommended and Andy explains the parameters needed.

Key to the inter-site transport is trunking whereby the individual essences are mixed down to one flow. This has a number of advantages: Reducing the number of flows makes life simpler for service providers, all essences will now share the same signal path from site to site and it FEC protection can be more efficiently applied.

The trunks are made using GRE – Generic Routing Encapsulation – which is a pre-existing IT standard for grouping lots of traffic into a single tunnel whilst preserving the data inside. This then appears at the other end of the trunk with the same IP information as if nothing had happened. Andy looks at the extra encapsulation headers needed to make this work and goes on to discuss payload lengths as we need to keep them short so as not to result in fragmented packets.

Timing, as ever, is important meaning that the recommendation is to align all essences before sending them in to the trunk, though Andy looks at alternatives. Also of key concern is compression as there will be times when uncompressed video is simply too high a bandwidth to be carried on the WAN. JPEG 2000 and, now, JPEG XS are available for this task.

Andy covers timing, discovery, control, security and conversion to and from 2022-6 before finishing the talk by taking questions.

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Speaker

Andy Rayner Andy Rayner
Chief Technologist,
Nevion

Video: Red and Blue, or Purple; Your IP Media Network, Your Way


Leaf & spine networks have started taking over data centres in the last few years. It’s no secret that people prefer scale-out over scale-up solutions and you can see a similar approach in ST 2110 networks, when large monolithic video switches are replaced with smaller leaf and spine switches.

Leaf and spine refers to networks where a number of main, high throughput switches link to a number of smaller switches. These smaller switches tend to be aggregators and offer the promise of cheaper ports delivered closer to your equipment. The alternative to leaf & spine is monolithic switches which do have their merits, but are certainly not always the right choice.

To provide non-blocking switching in leaf & spine networks you need an SDN controller that orchestrates media flows. Advances in SDN capabilities have led to the emergence of “Purple” network architectures. In this video Gerard Phillips from Arista shows how it differs from a “Red/Blue” architecture, how path diversity is maintained and how ST 2110 IP live production or playout applications could benefit from it.

It’s important to be aware of the different uses of Layer 2 vs Layer 3:

    • Layer 2 devices are typically used for audio networks like Dante and RAVENNA. A layer 2 network is a simple, scalable and affordable choice for audio flows where there are no challenges in terms of bandwidth. However, this type of network doesn’t really work for high bit rate live production video multicast since all multicasts need to be delivered to the IGMP querier which isn’t scalable.

    • Layer 3 have distributed IGMP management since PIM is used on each router to route multicast traffic, so there is no more flooding network with unnecessary traffic. This type of network works well with high bit rate video multicasts, but as IGMP is not bandwidth aware, it’s best to use an SDN system for flow orchestration.

Gerard then looks at resilience:

  • Using 2022-7 seamless switching (plus a robust monitoring system that can provide quick, accurate information to resolve the issue)
  • Choosing quality components (switches, NOS, fibres etc.)
  • Providing redundancy (redundant PSU, fans, fabric modules etc., redundant links between switches, ensuring that routing protocol or SDN can use these “spares”)
  • Dividing up failure domains
  • Using leaf and spine architecture (routing around failed components with SDN)
  • Using resilient IP protocols (BGP, ECMP)

The talk finishes up discussing the pros and cons of the different architectures available:

  • Monolithic systems which are non-blocking, but have a wide failure domain
  • Monolithic – expansion toward spine and leaf with SDN for non-blocking switching
  • Leaf & spine with air-gapped Red and Blue networks
  • Leaf & spine hybrid with Purple switches connected to both Red and Blue spines to support single homed devices
  • Leaf & spine Purple. Here, red and blue flows are connected to physically separate switches, but the switches are not identified as red and blue anymore. This is a converged network and an SDN controller is required to provide diverse paths flows to go to two different spines.

You can download the slides from here.

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Speaker

Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Systems Engineer
Arista Networks

Video: ST 2110 – From Theory to Reality

Delivering an all-IP truck is no mean feat. tpc explains what they learnt, what went well and how they succeeded in delivering a truck which takes no longer to fire up than a traditional SDI truck.

A common question among people considering a move to IP is ‘do I need to?’ and ‘how can I get ready?’. Here at The Broadcast Knowledge we always say ‘find a small project, get it working, learn what goes wrong and then plan the one you really wanted to do.’ The Swiss broadcasting service provider ‘Technology and Production Centre’, known as ‘tpc’, has done just that.

tpc is currently working on the Metechno project – a large, all-IP news, sports and technology centre for Swiss radio and television. In order to acquire necessary experience with the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, tpc designed the UHD1 OB van ahead of time which has been used in TV production for 6 months now. In this video, Andreas Lattmann shares the vision of the Metechno Project and, critically, his experiences related to the design and use of the truck.

The UHD1 is a 24-camera OB van with all IP core based on Arista switches with non-blocking architecture. It is the equivalent of an 184-square UHD SDI system however, it can be expanded by adding additional line cards to network switches. The truck is format agnostic, supporting both HD and UHD formats in HDR and SDR. IP gateways are incorporated for SDI equipment.

The SMPTE ST 2110 specification separates video and audio into discrete essence streams which boosts efficiency and flexibility, but we hear in this talk that more attention to latency (lip-sync) is required compared to SDI systems. Andreas talks about the flexibility this truck provides with up-/down-conversion, colour-correction for any video plus how IP has enabled full flexibility in what can be routed to the multiviewer screens.

Andreas spends some time discussing redundancy and how IP enables full redundancy – an improvement over many SDI infrastructures and how SMPTE’s ST 2022-7 standard makes this possible.

The main GUI is based on a Lawo VSM control system which aims to deliver a familiar experience for operators who used to work in the SDI domain. Network training has been provided for all operators because troubleshooting has changed significantly with the introduction of essences over IP. This is not least because NMOS IS-04 and 05 standards were not mature enough during the design of the truck, so all IP connections had to be managed manually. With more than 50 thousand IP addresses in this system, AMWA’s NMOS IS-04 which manages discovery and registration and IS-05 which manages the setup and take-down of connections would have helped significantly in the lean management of the truck.

Lattmann emphasizes the importance of using open standards like SMPTE ST 2110 instead of proprietary solutions. That allows you to choose the best components and not rely on a single manufacturer.

The learning’s the Andreas presents us involve difficulties with PTP, IP training, the benefits of flexibility. From a video point of view, Andreas presents his experiences with HDR->SDR workflows, focussing in HDR and UHD.

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Speaker

Andreas Lattmann Andreas Lattmann
CTO, Head of Planning & Projects
tpc Switzerland AG

Video: IP For Media Webcast Part II

Following on from last week’s post part II is here. Wes Simpson looks at use of IP in Remote Production/Remote Integration (REMI) and finished with a panel discussion including Newtek and Grass Valley, a Belden brand.

This video talks about:

  • Why Broadcasters need networking?
  • Typical Live remote sports broadcast roles
  • Overview of video & audio Signal types
  • HDR & Wide Colour Gamut (WCG)
  • Data (metadata, scripts etc)
  • REMI – Remote Integration, AKA ‘Remote Production’ in Europe.
  • Overview of what tasks can be done at base, what still needs to be done ‘on-site’
  • Uncompressed formats summary (SDI, 2022-6, 2110)
  • Slice-based compression
  • Mezzanine compression
  • TR-01 for carrying JPEG 2000 & audio
  • Bonded Cellular
  • Packetloss & FEC (Forward Error Correction)
  • 2022-7 – route diversity
  • Typical delays
  • Plus a panel discussion

 
Watch now!

Speakers

Wes Simpson Wes Simpson
President,
Telecom Product Consulting
Tom Butts Tom Butts
Content Director,
TV Technology