A generic monitoring architecture for assuring the QoS in mobile TV platforms

Nowadays main service providers are launching the initial mobile TV commercial services, which are offered from wireless broadband networks. This article shows a common architecture for monitoring the QoS (Quality of Service) of mobile TV platforms. This solution, which is based on the analysis of quality figures through network probes, will allow service providers to offer their audiovisual services in a competitive manner. The proposal includes the development of an monitoring architecture founded on a common open architecture that gathers the data from the different network segments in a convergent way. This aspect means that the mobile TV services are permanently end-to-end supervised from both the access and the core network. In this specific scenario, the UMTS/3G underlying transport network has been considered to carry the mobile TV service. On the other hand, the core network is constituted by the content delivery platform and the central services centre (CSC), which orchestrates the services offered to end users, such as multicast TV, Video on Demand (VoD) or Pay-per-view (PPV). This paper includes the results obtained from this monitoring platform, applied to on of the major mobile Telco companies, explicitly for the VoD service based on videostreaming sessions.