What Is Key Video Conference Assurance?

Why Do We Need Key Video Conference Assurance?

As digital transformation accelerates, video conferences are being held for more and more things such as remote training, bidding and procurement, policy publicity, and emergency command. Video conferences have become representative of efficiency improvement and digital transformation of governments and enterprises, and are key applications to further drive productivity. But with intensive construction ongoing, traditional transport networks need to carry various applications of different organizations, making it even more difficult to assure video conferences.

A video conference is assured through multi-party coordination on the conference system side and the network side. The main process includes device commissioning, process drill, and emergency rehearsal before the conference; onsite attendance, status monitoring, and emergency handling during the conference; and summary recording and report output after the conference. During the practice of assuring video conferences in different regions, network-side assurance mainly faces the following challenges:

• High requirements on conference quality, making stable experience difficult

  Video conferences are real-time services. Packet loss, delay, and jitter have a major impact on the audio and video quality of the conferences. In particular, unexpected packet loss may cause problems such as artifacts and frame freezing. As intensive network construction accelerates and network traffic increases sharply, video conference traffic is susceptible to interference by other service traffic. Consequently, stable and high-quality video conference experience cannot be ensured.

• Long conference traffic path, leading to difficult E2E assurance

  Video conference traffic passes through conference terminals, networks, and conference servers, making it difficult to demarcate faults if they occur. Furthermore, problems on networks — which involve LANs, carrier networks, and transport networks — are difficult to demarcate and locate because there is no efficient and accurate method for doing so. In particular, LANs are complex and difficult to manage in a unified manner, and their O&M capabilities are uneven. These issues make E2E video conference assurance difficult.

• Difficult collaboration between videos and networks, affecting assurance efficiency

  Conference assurance requires the cooperation of technical personnel from multiple teams, such as those of carriers, governments, and enterprises. Before a conference can be held, conference information and related network information need to be manually communicated, resulting in low efficiency in preparing for conference assurance. During the conference, its quality cannot be promptly detected by the network side, nor can the conference side learn the network topology or data forwarding path. If a fault occurs, both sides work independently, and no efficient collaboration method is available. As a result, fault locating and recovery are slow.

In conclusion, systematic consideration needs to be given to video conference network assurance. Before a conference, automatic collaboration of the assurance process must be supported. During the conference, the status of the video conference application and that of the network can be viewed, the quality of key conference sites can be obtained in real time, and the network can be immediately checked if the video conference application is abnormal. And after the conference, historical data can be played back to quickly summarize the conference assurance effect.

What Benefits Can Key Video Conference Assurance Bring?

Key video conference assurance offers the following core benefits:

• Agile booking before a conference, making it easy to achieve key service assurance

  The unified O&M service platform provides the conference assurance booking service, supports one-click application for key conference assurance booking, and implements automatic conference assurance deployment through process work orders, thereby improving the efficiency of preparing for conference assurance.

• Experience assurance during a conference, providing an overview of a video network map on one screen

  APN6 is used 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 video conference service status and network situation on the entire network in real time, implementing full-process control of the conference status and enabling quick demarcation and locating of poor quality of experience (QoE).

• Journey playback after a conference, ensuring the presentation of work value

  Assurance reports are automatically generated, and data such as conference access, network resource usage, and full-process quality data is comprehensively displayed, helping assurance personnel efficiently output reports and present assurance effects.

Networking Architecture of Key Video Conference Assurance

The networking architecture of key video conference assurance consists of the operation service layer, interconnection control layer, and infrastructure layer.

The layers of the networking architecture are described as follows:

• Operation service layer: The unified O&M service platform provides full-lifecycle video conference assurance services before, during, and after a conference, centrally displaying the video conference service status and network status in a video network map.
• Interconnection control layer: includes the conference management system and network controller. The conference management system manages conference terminals and conference servers, controls conferences, and provides conference system status information for the unified O&M service platform. The network controller manages and controls routers and flow probes, analyzes traffic, and provides conference network status information for the unified O&M service platform.
• Infrastructure layer: includes conference terminals, conference servers, routers, and flow probes. Conference terminals and conference servers encode and decode audio and video traffic, into which they encapsulate APN6 IDs (the conference system is required to support APN6). A conference terminal accesses the transport network in video network-to-edge mode. A video access router is deployed in the department LAN to directly access the transport network, eliminating the need for conference traffic to pass through the department LAN's devices and thereby simplifying the conference network environment. If a conference terminal cannot directly access the transport network, dedicated switches, dedicated ports, and VLANs can be provided in the department LAN or data center to isolate the video conference service from other services in the LAN or data center to some extent.

The transport network provides exclusive bandwidth resources for the video conference service through E2E network slicing, and implements path visualization and quality monitoring for such service through IFIT. In terms of service network quality awareness, flow probes are deployed on the routers on the conference server side to collect conference traffic and analyze its quality, detecting poor QoE in real time. In addition, with IFIT deployed on the transport network, poor QoE on the department LAN, data center, and transport network can be demarcated.

Effect of Key Video Conference Assurance

The following describes the effect of key video conference assurance based on the assurance process of a conference.

• Agile booking of assurance services before a conference and automatic deployment of device-network synergy assurance

  A conference user applies to book a conference on the unified O&M service platform, selects the key assurance service, and fills in conference information. After the conference assurance application is approved, the unified O&M service platform identifies the conference system used for the conference. The user enters the conference ID to obtain detailed information about the conference site. In addition, the unified O&M service platform is connected to a network controller to automatically deploy IFIT quality measurement for conference traffic. In the pre-conference commissioning phase, each conference site joins the rehearsal conference. A router collects information about conference traffic and reports it to the network controller, which restores the conference network access topology and centrally displays the conference network status on a video network map provided by the unified O&M service platform. This map can be used to quickly handle joint commissioning problems, improving the efficiency of pre-conference joint commissioning.

• One-screen display of network situation during a conference, ensuring manageable, visualized, and controllable status

  During conference assurance, the unified O&M service platform continuously collects conference and network quality data and displays it in a video network map. Conference assurance personnel can view basic conference information, alarm information, conference site performance situation/trend, and more on the map to monitor the overall situation of the conference in real time.

  During a video conference, the unified O&M service platform can continuously monitor the quality of both the network and applications, and also quickly demarcate and locate exceptions.

  • Monitoring the video network quality during a conference. In the overall conference situation diagram, a conference server is shown in the center, with conference terminals as endpoints and network connections as lines. The status of the conference and network quality is displayed in different colors on the geographic information system (GIS) map. Green, yellow, and red indicate normal, average, and poor quality, respectively. If the video service is displayed in red or yellow, users can quickly determine whether the fault occurs in the video conference system or on the network based on the colors of user-side endpoints and network connections.
  • Demarcating and locating poor QoE of a conference. If a conference has poor QoE and the network connection color is green, users can troubleshoot faults on the corresponding conference terminal and conference server. They can click the endpoint to go to the conference management platform for confirmation and quickly rectify user-side faults through a conference system/terminal backup or restart. Alternatively, users can request assurance personnel of the conference system to perform emergency handling for conference system faults.
  • Demarcating and locating poor QoE of a network. The unified O&M service platform provides the video conference network slice topology, and uses IFIT to restore the network path of a specified participant in the topology in a highlighted manner through the network controller. In addition, the platform displays popup information showing the quality of each hop, helping quickly demarcate and locate poor QoE. After identifying poor-QoE nodes, the unified O&M service platform can use SRv6 path programmability through the network controller to bypass these nodes, quickly handling network problems and promptly restoring services.
• Full-process recording of assurance data after a conference, supporting the generation of poor-QoE backtracking reports

  After a conference ends, the unified O&M service platform automatically deletes related conference assurance policies and integrates conference system and network data. It then extracts rich data (including conference access information and multi-dimensional quality information) and automatically generates conference reports, which can then be downloaded. Users can orchestrate conference report templates as required to efficiently summarize and output conference reports. In addition, the unified O&M service platform identifies key improvement points of conference assurance to provide a basis for optimizing the conference system and network, continuously improving the conference assurance efficiency and effect.