Gerard Phillips

Video: PTP/ST 2059 Best Practices developed from PTP deployments and experiences

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

PTP is foundational for SMPTE ST 2110 systems. It provides the accurate timing needed to make the most out of almost zero-latency professional video systems. In the strictest sense, some ST 2110 workflows can work without PTP where they’re not combining signals, but for live production, this is almost never the case. This is why a lot of time and effort goes into getting PTP right from the outset because making it work perfectly from the outset gives you the bedrock on which to build your most valuable infrastructure upon.

In this video, Gerard Phillips from Arista, Leigh Whitcomb from Imagine Communications and Telestream’s Mike Waidson join forces to run down their top 15 best practices of building a PTP infrastructure you can rely on.

Gerard kicks off underlining the importance of PTP but with the reassuring message that if you ‘bake it in’ to your underlying network, with PTP-aware equipment that can support the scale you need, you’ll have the timing system you need. Thinking of scale is important as PTP is a bi-directional protocol. That is, it’s not like the black and burst and TLS that it replaces which are simply waterfall signals. Each endpoint needs to speak to a clock so understanding how many devices you’ll be having and where is important to consider. For a look a look at PTP itself, rather than best practices, have a look at this talk free registration required or this video with Meinberg.

 

 

Gerard’s best practices advice continues as he recommends using a routed network meaning having multiple layer 2 networks with layer 3 routing between This reduces the broadcast domain size which, in turn, increases stability and resilience. JT-NM TR-1001 can help to assist in deployments using this network architecture. Gerard next cautions about layer 2 IGMP snoopers and queriers which should exist on every VLAN. As the multicast traffic is flooded to the snooping querier in layer 2, it’s important to consider traffic flows.

When Gerard says PTP should be ‘baked in’, it’s partly boundary clocks he’s referring to. Use them ‘everywhere you can’ is the advice as they bring simplicity to your design and allow for easier debugging. Part of the simplicity they bring is in helping the scalability as they shed load from your GM, taking the brunt of the bi-directional traffic and can reduce load on the endpoints.

It’s long been known that audio devices, for instance, older versions of Dante before v4.2, use version one of PTP which isn’t compatible with SPMTE ST 2059’s requirement to use PTP v2. Gerard says that, if necessary, you should buy a version 1 to version 2 converter from your audio vendor to join the v1 island to your v2 infrastructure. This is linked to best practice point 6; All GMs must have the same time. Mike makes the point that all GMs should be locked to GPS and that if you have multiple sites, they should all have an active, GPS-locked GM even if they do send PTP to each other over a WAN as that is likely to deliver less accurate timing even if it is useful as a backup.

Even if you are using physically separate networks for your PTP and ST 2110 main and backup networks, it’s important to have a link between the two GMs for ST 2022-7 traffic so a link between the two networks just for PTP traffic should be established.

The next 3 points of advice are about the ongoing stability of the network. Firstly, ST 2059-2 specifies the use of TLV messages as part of a mechanism for media notes to generate drop-frame timecode. Whilst this may not be needed day 1, if you have it running and show your PTP system works well with it on, there shouldn’t be any surprises in a couple of years when you need to introduce an end-point that will use it. Similarly, the advice is to give your PTP domain a number which isn’t a SMPTE or AES default for the sole reason that if you ever have a device join your network which hasn’t been fully configured, if it’s still on defaults it will join your PTP domain and could disrupt it. If, part of the configuration of a new endpoint is changing the domain number, the chances of this are notably reduced. One example of a configuration item which could affect the network is ‘ptp role master’ which will stop a boundary clock from taking part in BCMA and prevents unauthorised end-points taking over.

Gerard lays out the ways in which to do ‘proper commissioning’ which is the way you can verify, at the beginning, that your PTP network is working well-meaning you have designed and built your system correctly. Unfortunately, PTP can appear to be working properly when in reality it is not for reasons of design, the way your devices are acting, configuration or simply due to bugs. To account for this, Gerard advocates separate checklists for GM switches and media nodes with a list of items to check…and this will be a long list. Commissioning should include monitoring the PTP traffic, and taking a packet capture, for a couple of days for analysis with test and measurement gear or simply Wireshark.

Leigh finishes up the video talking about verifying functionality during redundancy switches and on power-up. Commissioning is your chance to characterise the behaviour of the system in these transitory states and to observe how equipment attached is affected. His last point before summarising is to implement a PTP monitoring solution to capture the critical parameters and to detect changes in the system. SMPTE RP 2059-15 will define parameters to monitor, with the aim that monitoring across vendors will provide some sort of consistent metrics. Also, a new version of IEEE-1588, version 2.1, will add monitoring features that should aid in actively monitoring the timing in your ST 2110 system.

This Arista white paper contains further detail on many of these best practices.

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Speakers

Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Solutions Engineer,
Arista
Leigh Whitcomb Leigh Whitcomb
Principal Engineer.
Imagine
Michael Waidson Mike Waidson
Application Engineer,
Telestream

Video: As Time Goes by…Precision Time Protocol in the Emerging Broadcast Networks

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How much timing do you need? PTP can get you timing in the nanoseconds, but is that needed, how can you transport it and how does it work? These questions and more are under the microscope in this video from RTS Thames Valley.

SMPTE Standards Vice President, Bruce Devlin introduces the two main speakers by reminding us why we need timing and how we dealt with it in the past. Looking back to the genesis of television, points out Bruce, everything was analogue and it was almost impossible to delay a signal at all. An 8cm, tightly wound coil of copper would give you only 450 nanoseconds of delay alternatively quartz crystals could be used to create delays. In the analogue world, these delays were used to time signals and since little could be delayed, only small adjustments were necessary. Bruce’s point is that we’ve swapped around now. Delays are everywhere because IP signals need to be buffered at every interface. It’s easy to find buffers that you didn’t know about and even small ones really add up. Whereas analogue TV got us from camera to TV within microseconds, it’s now a struggle to get below two seconds.

Hand in hand with this change is the change from metadata and control data being embedded in the video signal – and hence synchronised with the video signal – to all data being sent separately. This is where PTP, Precision Time Protocol, comes in. An IP-based timing mechanism that can keep time despite the buffers and allow signals to be synchronised.

 

 

Next to speak is Richard Hoptroff whose company works with broadcasters and financial services to provide accurate time derived from 4 satellite services (GPS, GLONASS etc) and the Swedish time authority RiSE. They have been working on the problem of delivering time to people who can’t put up antennas either because they are operating in an AWS datacentre or broadcasting from an underground car park. Delivering time by a wired network, Richard points out, is much more practical as it’s not susceptible to jamming and spoofing, unlike GPS.

Richard outlines SMPTE’s ST 2059-2 standard which says that a local system should maintain accuracy to within 1 microsecond. the JT-NM TR1001-1 specification calls for a maximum of 100ms between facilities, however Richard points out that, in practice, 1ms or even 10 microseconds is highly desired. And in tests, he shows that with layer 2, PTP unicast looping around western Europe was able to adhere to 1 microsecond, layer 3 within 10 microseconds. Over the internet, with a VPN Richard says he’s seen around 40 microseconds which would then feed into a boundary clock at the receiving site.

Summing up Richard points out that delivering PTP over a wired network can deliver great timing without needing timing hardware on an OPEX budget. On top of that, you can use it to add resilience to any existing GPS timing.

Gerard Philips from Arista speaks next to explain some of the basics about how PTP works. If you are interested in digging deeper, please check out this talk on PTP from Arista’s Robert Welch.

Already in use by many industries including finance, power and telecoms, PTP is base on IEEE-1588 allowing synchronisation down to 10s of nanoseconds. Just sending out a timestamp to the network would be a problem because jitter is inherent in networks; it’s part and parcel of how switches work. Dealing with the timing variations as smaller packets wait for larger packets to get out of the way is part of the job of PTP.

To do this, the main clock – called the grandmaster – sends out the time to everyone 8 times a second. This means that all the devices on the network, known as endpoints, will know what time it was when the message was sent. They still won’t know the actual time because they don’t know how long the message took to get to them. To determine this, each endpoint has to send a message back to the grandmaster. This is called a delay request. All that happens here is that the grandmaster replies with the time it received the message.

PTP Primary-Secondary Message Exchange.
Source: Meinberg [link]

This gives us 4 points in time. The first (t1) is when the grandmaster sent out the first message. The second (t2) is when the device received it. t3 is when the endpoint sent out its delay request and t4 is the time when the master clock received that request. The difference between t2 and t1 indicates how long the original message took to get there. Similarly, t4-t3 gives that information in the other direction. These can be combined to derive the time. For more info either check out Arista’s talk on the topic or this talk from RAVENNA and Meinberg from which the figure above comes.

Gerard briefly gives an overview of Boundary Clock which act as secondary time sources taking pressure off the main grandmaster(s) so they don’t have to deal with thousands of delay requests, but they also solve a problem with jitter of signals being passed through switches as it’s usually the switch itself which is the boundary clock. Alternatively, Transparent Clock switches simply pass on the PTP messages but they update the timestamps to take account of how long the message took to travel through the switch. Gerard recommends only using one type in a single system.

Referring back to Bruce’s opening, Gerard highlights the need to monitor the PTP system. Black and burst timing didn’t need monitoring. As long as the main clock was happy, the DA’s downstream just did their job and on occasion needed replacing. PTP is a system with bidirectional communication and it changes depending on network conditions. Gerard makes a plea to build a monitoring system as part of your solution to provide visibility into how it’s working because as soon as there’s a problem with PTP, there could quickly be major problems. Network switches themselves can provide a lot of telemetry on this showing you delay values and allowing you to see grandmaster changes.

Gerard’s ‘Lessons Learnt’ list features locking down PTP so only a few ports are actually allowed to provide time information to the network, dealing carefully with audio protocols like Dante which need PTP version 1 domains, and making sure all switches are PTP-aware.

The video finishes with Q&A after a quick summary of SMPTE RP 2059-15 which is aiming to standardise telemetry reporting on PTP and associated information. Questions from the audience include asking how easy it is to do inter-continental PTP, whether the internet is prone to asymmetrical paths and how to deal with PTP in the cloud.

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Speakers

Bruce Devlin Bruce Devlin
Standards Vice President,
SMPTE
Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Systems Engineer,
Arista
Richard Hoptroff Richard Hoptroff
Founder and CTO
Hoptroff London Ltd

Video: IP Media Networks for Live Production

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Building and controlling a network for SMPTE ST 2110 go hand in hand when it comes to planning an installation. As ST 2110 delivers all media essences separately, networks can easily end up carrying tens of thousands of flows emphasising the need for efficient network design and having a full understanding of the paths your media are using.

This video is co-presented by Nevion and Arista and starts by observing that the traditional difference between a LAN and WAN is being eroded leading as WANs get faster and better, we find that we can now deliver multi-location broadcast facilities which act similarly to if everything was co-located. Moreover, introduces Martin Walbum Media Function virtualisation which is enabled by network-connected equipment allowing for shared processing and shared control. For instance, it’s now possible to house all equipment in a datacentre and allow this to be used remotely maximising the utilisation of the equipment allowing a broadcaster to maximise the value of its purchases and minimise costs.

Arista’s Gerard Phillips takes a look at SDI systems to understand how we expect IP systems to behave and what we expect them to do. The system needs to deliver high throughput, instantaneous switching with low latency and no tolerance for failure. In order to do this, not only do we need to get the right software but to deliver the resilience we need, the network needs the correct architecture. Gerard takes us through the different options starting with a typical, flat, layer 2 networks and working up to leaf and spine along with a treatment of red, blue and purple networks.

Gerard recently did a deep dive on network design for live production for the IET. Take a look for much more detail on how to architect a network for uncompressed media.

Martin then looks at the need for orchestration. Broadcasters expect to deliver systems with, preferably, no downtime. As such, we’ve seen that network elements are typically duplicated as is the traffic which is delivered over two paths and SMPTE ST 2022-7. If you want to take something out of use for planned maintenance, it’s best to do that in a planned, ordered, way meaning you migrate flows away from it until it’s no longer in-circuit. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), do exactly that. Martin walks us through the pros and cons of managing your network with IGMP and SDN. Gerard’s previous talk also looks at this in detail.

The video finishes with a look at which Arista switches can be used for media and a look at how Arista and Nevion implemented an ST 2110 network at Swiss broadcaster, tpc. This case study is presented in longer form in this video from the IP Showcase.

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Free registration.
Speakers

Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Systems Engineer,
Arista
Martin Walbum Martin Walbum
Senior Vice President of Solution Strategy,
Nevion

Video: Network Design for Live Production

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The benefits of IP sound great, but many are held back with real-life concerns: Can we afford it? Can we plug the training gap? and how do we even do it? This video looks at the latter; how do you deploy a network good enough for uncompressed video, audio and metadata? The network needs to deal with a large number of flows, many of which are high bandwidth. If you’re putting it to air, you need reliability and redundancy. You need to distribute PTP timing, control and maintain it.

Gerard Philips from Arista talks to IET Media about the choices you need to make when designing your network. Gerard starts by reminding us of the benefits of moving to IP, the most tangible of which is the switching density possible. SDI routers can use a whole rack to switch over one thousand sources, but with IP Gerard says you can achieve a 4000-square router within just 7U. With increasingly complicated workflows and with the increasing scale of some broadcasters, this density is a major motivating factor in the move. Doubling down on the density message, Gerard then looks at the difference in connectivity available comparing SDI cables which have signal per cable, to 400Gb links which can carry 65 UHD signals per link.

Audio is always ahead of video when it comes to IP transitions so there are many established audio-over-IP protocols, many of which work at Layer 2 over the network stack. Using Layer 2 has great benefits because there is no routing which means that discovering everything on the network is as simple as broadcasting a question and waiting for answers. Discovery is very simple and is one reason for the ‘plug and play’ ease of NDI, being a layer 2 protocol, it can use mDNS or similar to query the network and display sources and destinations available within seconds. Layer 3-based protocols don’t have this luxury as some resources can be on a separate network which won’t receive a discovery request that’s simply broadcast on the local network.

Gerard examines the benefits of layer 2 and explains how IGMP multicast works detailing the need for an IGMP querier to be in one location and receiving all the traffic. This is a limiting factor in scaling a network, particularly with high-bandwidth flows. Layer 3, we hear, is the solution to this scaling problem bringing with it more control of the size of ‘failure domains’ – how much of your network breaks if there’s a problem.

The next section of the video gets down to the meat of network design and explains the 3 main types of architecture: Monolithic, Hub and spoke and leaf and spoke. Gerard takes time to discuss the validity of all these architectures before discussing coloured networks. Two identical networks dubbed ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ are often used to provide redundancy in SMPTE ST 2110, and similar uncompressed, networks with the idea that the source generates two identical streams and feeds them over these two identical networks. The receiver receives both streams and uses SMPTE ST 2022-7 to seamlessly deal with packet loss. Gerard then introduces ‘purple’ networks, ones where all switch infrastructure is in the same network and the network orchestrator ensures that each of the two essence flows from the source takes a separate route through the infrastructure. This means that for each flow there is a ‘red’ and a ‘blue’ route, but overall each switch is carrying a mixture of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ traffic.

The beauty of using IGMP/PIM for managing traffic over your networks is that the network itself decides how the flows move over the infrastructure. This makes for a low-footprint, simple installation. However, without the ability to take into account individual link capacity, the capacity of the network in general, bitrate of individual flows and understanding the overall topology, there is very control over where your traffic is which makes maintenance and fault-finding hard and, more generally, what’s the right decision for one small part of the network is not necessarily the right decision for the flow or for the network as a whole. Gerard explains how Software-Defined Networking (SDN) address this and give absolute control over the path your flows take.

Lastly, Gerard looks at PTP, the Precision Time Protocol. 2110 relies on having the PTP in the flow, in the essence allowing flows of separate audio and video to have good lip-sync and to avoid phase errors when audio is mixed together (where PTP has been used for some time). We see different architectures which include two grandmaster clocks (GMs), discuss whether boundary clocks (BCs) or transparent clocks (TCs) are the way to go and examine the little security that is available to stop rogue end-points taking charge and becoming grandmaster themselves.

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Speaker

Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Systems Engineer,
Arista