Products

Multimedia Traffic Management

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• More Information
• White Paper: Zhone's Multimedia Traffic Management Solution
• Frequently Asked Questions

MTM™ (Multimedia Traffic Management) is a suite of powerful application and service management features, enabling Carriers and PTTs to support new revenue-generating services on their broadband access network. By enabling voice, video, data, online gaming, and other services in all areas of the network, service providers can offer new bundled services that will increase the income potential from each broadband access line.

MTM is much more than "Quality of Service" — because it allows full control over an application or service. MTM allows a network administrator to classify whether a packet is broadcast video, VOD, IP voice, or virtually any IP data service such as OAM traffic or a Set Top Box boot-file download. Once identified, MTM goes a step beyond its eight levels of prioritization with dynamic buffers and dedicated queues — it also provides the ability to assign asynchronous rate limits, and can even steer traffic throughout the IP backbone. With full support of industry standards, MTM fully interoperates with other Layer-3 and Layer-4 traffic management systems, such as those found on core routers.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does MTM enable Triple Play?

MTM allows service providers to carefully separate traffic based upon application or service. This means that û at a very basic level û voice, video and data services can each be tracked, prioritized, and controlled separately. However, MTM offers greater visibility and control than this. For example, MTM can not only differentiate between video and data, it can differentiate between a PC's web download and a Set Top Box's download of important channel guide information. Similarly, MTM can steer traffic upstream based upon whether it originates from a PC or a Set Top Box, or upon whether or not the traffic is destined for an Internet service or a locally hosted service.

How Does MTM Work?

MTM approaches traffic management in two steps: the first is to classify traffic by application or service, and the second is to then apply a traffic management profile to that classified service. Each service may be classified using several methods: Differentiated Services (DiffServ), IP Type of Service (TOS), IP source/destination address, MAC source/destination address, or VLAN. Once classified, each profile may be: Prioritized (8 priority levels with 8 queues) using 802.1p; Rate-limited, both upstream and downstream to provide a bandwidth cap for that service; and optionally tagged into a Virtual LAN using 802.1Q, which allows other IP routers and switches to control where the service traffic goes, even outside of the Zhone access network.

Other vendors support 802.1Q, 802.1p, and DiffServ. Isn't this the same thing?

No. MTM uses these standard technologies, but in a very unique way. MTM applies these protocols and standards to Layer-3 flow control mechanisms û like those that are typically found only in core IP routers and application-aware switches. This requires a great deal of processing and switching power on both the access port and the network interface, because there is a deep inspection of each and every packet. In order to perform these types of services at wire speed, the power of MTM's underlying hardware architecture is needed.

Why do you need to support so many traffic profiles on a single port?

"Triple Play" is more than three traffic types. For example, within the category of "video traffic" there is: Multicast Video streams; Multicast Video channel changes (IGMP); Video on Demand; Set Top Box firmware downloads; Set Top Box DHCP requests; Electronic Program Guide data; HTTP (for on-TV web browsing through the Set Top Box) and others. Each of these traffic types needs to be considered separately. For example, the video broadcast requires high downstream bandwidth and high prioritization, but requires no upstream bandwidth at all. When a Set Top Box reboots, you may want to give all available bandwidth to that device for a firmware download in order to speed the boot process, giving it top prioritization and bi-directional communication. At the same time, you may want all VOD traffic to be steered to a unique VLAN so that your core IP router can account for all VOD traffic, packet-by-packet. MTM allows you the flexibility to make and enforce these decisions.

MTM seems like a lot of work. Is this hard to do?

MTM is a very sophisticated service, but it is not difficult to implement. This is because the profiles only need to be configured once, and then they can be copied to select ports or applied globally. However, even if configured globally, there is still the option to manage a specific port separately afterwards, in order to "tweak" MTM to a specific purpose on a specific port, if needed.