Carrier-grade Ethernet challenges for IPTV deployment

Carrier-grade Ethernet standardization and deployment is gaining momentum due to the ease of deployment, lower cost, and compatibility with existing networks on the access end. When Internet protocol television (IPTV) is deployed using Ethernet as the underlying interconnect fabric infrastructure, meeting fine-grained traffic management (TM) requirements on the service provider side to meet quality of service (QoS), billing, and security features implementation on the user side poses several challenges. Such challenges could be met using the TM features built into network processors (NPs).