Key Video Conference Assurance

What Is Key Video Conference Assurance?

Key video conference assurance leverages technologies like SRv6, network slicing, and IFIT to ensure secure, stable, smooth, and clear video conferences. It establishes a video conference system on the current network infrastructure, offering end-to-end assurance for video conferences.

Why Is Key Video Conference Assurance Necessary?

With the acceleration of digital transformation, video conferences are being used for a variety of purposes such as remote training, bidding and procurement, policy publicity, and emergency command. They have become emblematic of efficiency improvement and digital transformation for governments and enterprises, playing a key role in driving productivity. However, as extensive construction projects progress, traditional transport networks are required to support various applications from different organizations, making it increasingly challenging to ensure the quality of video conferences.

Assuring a video conference involves coordination between multiple parties, both on the conference system side and the network side. The main process includes device setup, procedural drills, and emergency rehearsals before the conference; on-site management, status monitoring, and emergency response during the conference; and summarization and reporting after the conference. During the implementation of video conference assurance in various regions, network-side assurance primarily encounters the following challenges:

• High demand for conference quality, making stable performance difficult: Video conferences are real-time services, where packet loss, delay, and jitter significantly impact audio and video quality. Intensified network construction and increased traffic make video conference traffic vulnerable to interference from other services, hindering stable and high-quality conference experiences.

• Long traffic path for conferences, making end-to-end assurance difficult: Video conference traffic traverses conference terminals, networks, and conference servers, making fault demarcation challenging in case of issues. Problems on LANs, carrier networks, and transport networks are hard to pinpoint due to the lack of efficient and precise fault location methods. LANs are especially complex to manage uniformly, with uneven O&M capabilities, complicating end-to-end video conference assurance.

• Limited collaboration between video and network teams, affecting assurance efficiency: Conference assurance requires cooperation among technical personnel from various teams, including carriers, governments, and enterprises. Before a conference, manual communication of conference and network information leads to low efficiency in preparing for assurance. During a conference, the network side cannot promptly detect the conference's quality, nor can the conference side immediately access network topology or data forwarding paths. In case of a fault, both sides work independently, lacking an efficient collaboration method, resulting in slow fault location and recovery.

In conclusion, comprehensive consideration must be given to video conference network assurance. Automated collaboration in the assurance process should be supported before a conference. During a conference, real-time monitoring of the video conference application and network status should be possible, enabling immediate network checks in case of application abnormalities. After a conference, historical data playback should be available for quick summarization of the assurance effect.

Effects of Key Video Conference Assurance

The impact of key video conference assurance is outlined below, based on the assurance process of a conference.

• Agile Booking of Assurance Services: Users can swiftly book conference assurance services through a unified O&M service platform. Upon approval, the platform identifies the conference system and deploys IFIT quality measurement for conference traffic automatically. This streamlines pre-conference commissioning, enhancing efficiency.

• One-screen Display of Network Situation: During a conference, the unified O&M service platform collects and displays real-time conference and network quality data on a video network map. This provides assurance personnel with a comprehensive view of conference information, alarm data, performance trends, and more, ensuring manageable, visualized, and controllable status.

• Continuous Monitoring of Network and Applications: The platform continuously monitors both network and application quality during a conference, quickly demarcating and locating exceptions. It provides a detailed view of the conference server, terminals, and network connections, indicating network and conference quality in different colors for easy troubleshooting.

• Demarcating and Locating Faults: If a conference experiences poor quality of experience (QoE), the platform can quickly identify the fault location. It allows users to troubleshoot faults on the conference terminal or server, perform emergency handling, and rectify user-side faults through system backups or restarts. It can also bypass poor-QoE nodes using SRv6 path programmability to restore services promptly.

• Full-process Recording of Assurance Data: After a conference, the platform automatically deletes related assurance policies, integrates conference and network data, and generates comprehensive reports. These reports include conference access information and multi-dimensional quality data, supporting the efficient summarization and output of conference reports. Additionally, the platform identifies key improvement points for conference assurance, facilitating the optimization of conference systems and networks, and enhancing overall assurance efficiency and effectiveness.

Benefits of Key Video Conference Assurance

1. Agile booking before a conference, facilitating key service assurance

The unified O&M service platform offers conference assurance booking services, supporting one-click application for key conference assurance booking. It implements automatic conference assurance deployment through process work orders, enhancing the efficiency of preparing for conference assurance.

2. Experience assurance during a conference, offering a comprehensive view on a single screen

APN6 is utilized to identify conference services for device-network synergy, providing video conference slice assurance, conference quality awareness, and hop-by-hop IFIT network measurement. The unified O&M service platform provides a video network map to display the real-time status of the video conference service and network situation across the entire network. It enables full-process control of the conference status and allows for quick demarcation and identification of poor quality of experience (QoE).

3. Post-conference playback, ensuring the demonstration of work value

Assurance reports are automatically generated, presenting comprehensive data such as conference access, network resource usage, and full-process quality data. This helps assurance personnel efficiently produce reports and demonstrate assurance effects.