Objective
A key issue to the cable industry is interoperability of interactive services. Greater market penetration of new services requires proper interoperability verification to be in place in particular with respect to MHP and IPCablecom components. Today no organisation is setting up laboratory facilities to MHP/IPCablecom components development support and compliance aspects. The current rationale is for operators to share R&D activities and avoid duplication of effort. The next generation of systems will attempt to implement the DVB-MHP and IPCablecom recommendations and emerging European specifications. However, there are many optional features, providing different levels of service and open to large variations of interpretation. Consultation with the sector has shown a high priority for practical interoperability assessment of the European access network equipment. CASSIC aims at verification and acceleration of further development of European extensions to the specification of IPCablecom network gateways, components and protocols by participating directly in the specification efforts of several industry and standardisation organisations and by providing, in parallel, an interoperability end-to-end testing laboratory supported by the manufacturers of European standardized cable communications solutions, IPCablecom/MHP developers and cable operators. This ensures earlier deployment.
Objectives:
a) To foster the introduction of various interactive services on the same HFC network through the use of the IPCablecom system with special consideration of Dynamic Quality of Service (DQoS) for efficient bandwidth utilisation;Lb) To accelerate the development of European IPCablecom network gateways and protocols by participating directly in specification efforts and by providing, in parallel, an interoperability end-to-end testing laboratory;
c) To prove, at a number of levels, the usability and interoperability of IPCablecom components over heterogeneous networks by:
1. Performing an assessment of the efficiency of IPCablecom in particular in the environment of DVB-MHP;
2. Providing facilities for development support and early detection of interoperability issues to the cable industry;
3. Creating an intra-access network interoperability test facility.
Work description:
In order to meet the objective the following actions are required to shorten the time-to-market of IPCablecom components and MHP development:
§ Establishing a testing laboratory (and a virtual one for self-testing by having continuous access to other manufacturer's platforms). Therefore, the overall product development cycle can be accelerated and interoperability issues can be identified early in the interactive test/develop process.
Verifying interoperability at a service and application level by simulation studies and efficiency assessment
§ Conducting end-to-end system tests across heterogeneous networks (Architecture Validation) and interconnecting virtual laboratories in order to provide interoperability tests among European platforms.
These actions are accomplished through four fundamental activities:
1. Contributing to the development of the extension to IPCablecom and DVB-MHP and participating in the meetings of relevant organisations (as ITU, ETSI, CableLabs, ECCA TC - emerged from ECL, DVB) in order to support the establishment of an end-to-end architecture that delivers advanced and real-time multimedia services over heterogeneous networks;
2. Defining a set of IPCablecom/MHP test specifications to verify that products are interoperable in that environment;
3. Preparing and maintaining the documents concerning IPCablecom/MHP Compliance Testing Verification. Creating a testing environment in which IPCablecom functional components and MHP can be tested both individually and as part of a larger system.
4. Conducting interoperability tests using the installed test-bed.
Milestones:
Milestone 1: European Cable Operators Requirements.
Milestone 2: CASSIC Tools and Facilities.
Milestone 3: CASSIC Verification Test Plan and Test Specifications.
Milestone 4: CASSIC Integrated Tools and Facilities.
Milestone 5: CASSIC Test Results.
Milestone 6: CASSIC Architecture Validation.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
50015 ZARAGOZA
Spain