Could Video Break Your New Software-Defined Network?

Ever-expanding video usage will take up most of business networks

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Published: April 21, 2017

Rebekah Carter - Writer

Rebekah Carter

By the time 2020 is over, experts predict that video will take up around 95% of business and Internet networks, with an even larger percentage being in real-time or near-real time video. Enterprise, network service, and cloud providers who recently struggled with VoIP solutions may find video to be an even greater challenge. Organisations that are looking for SDN solutions to manage their existing challenges with networking should find that SDN doesn’t work to address the underlying challenges involved with running video over IP networks.

Cisco’s annual forecast suggests that by 2020, around 82% of all the IP traffic will be IP video – an estimate based on new trends which does not account for the magnitude of various disruptive factors such as:

  • Embedded video analytics – the ability to identify what is occurring in a video in real-time could have a huge impact. Manufactures can watch employees assemble equipment, and this intelligence will drive greater value from video
  • VR and AR – Rather than capturing videos and posting them onto YouTube, more users stream real-time videos and get information from the world around them. Collaboration is becoming increasingly common, making video more popular
  • IoT- Gartner recently upgraded its forecast of the number of IoT devices predicted for 2020 from 20 billion to 30 billion. Since video is a key component of IoT, this is bound to play an important part

Video Is Empowering

The modern video is giving businesses, governments, and users across the world the chance to be anywhere – at any time. Modern IP networks will also need to rise to support all this new video traffic, and ensure incredible security and performance.

Regardless of whether video makes up 82% or 95% of network traffic by 2020, it’s sure to be the number one killer application for all IP networks. Real time video presents challenges for future and existing IPs because:

  • It consumes a lot of Bandwidth: As displays get richer, driving higher resolution streams, one hour video sessions grow from 1GB to 120GB an hour.
  • Variability: Unlike many applications that use a predictable amount of bandwidth and spikes per session, video sessions can vary widely. Modern video codecs are adaptive and use Forward Error Correction when congestion occurs, so a normal stream at 1Mbps that spikes to 2Mbps can speak up to 10Mbps under congestion.
  • Dynamic: Networks are static by design, using things like Call Admission Control to limit their number of video and voice sessions. The static configuration works relatively well for voice, but not at all for video. A fundamental problem with SDN and IMS architectures is that CAC is applied to the session when it is started. Once that session is underway, all following sessions are treated equally with the same QoS policy. However, not all sessions are equal.
  • No Stateful Awareness: Routing through a network is the only service that does not use stateful awareness. Load balancers, firewalls, and WAN optimisers are statefully aware and can manage, report, and control sessions. Though the SDN architecture can separate and control data planes, it doesn’t do much to address the lack of session awareness in routing, and without this, a router cannot manage a range of concurrent video streams effectively.
  • Low Security Controls: Unlike email or web traffic that uses proxies or VoIP traffic which makes use of Session Border Controls, the security surrounding video is weak. The video proxy type devices are proprietary. Video runs atop UDP, using a range of ports, and this leads to complications in security.
  • Lack of Seamless Roaming: Since video is needed all the time on mobile devices, we will still need the video session to persist across a range of networks. Today, this process can require changing IP addresses, and it can be very clunky at best.

While many network enterprises rely on NFV and SDN to solve the IP networking problems of today, the chances are that they will not solve the problems of tomorrow’s primarily video-based networking services. The best thing for companies to do is ask how their SDN vendors plan to manage a lot of video traffic. Remember, CAC and QoS are not the answer, so you will need to seek new solutions.

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