Alcatel-Lucent is rolling out a series of enhancements to its Velocix Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution to enable pay-TV operators to better manage their networks and set a new standard for the customer experience of IP video services. The new capabilities bring this CDN solution in line with Alcatel-Lucent’s NFV portfolio.
The company said its goal with these improvements is to decouple the software that controls and routes traffic on a network from the physical infrastructure that provides compute and storage resources. This greatly reduces the time needed to install or expand the CDN. Virtualization also gives operators the agility to instantly create a new CDN cache in case of a hardware failure, minimizing any potential disruption in quality of service.
Specifically, the Velocix Virtual CDN will use automatic resource allocation to create an ‘elastic CDN’ capable of adjusting capacity to both planned and unexpected changes in demand, for example during a popular sporting event or due to a viral video. After the peak, computing resource can be released for other applications.
Additional new capabilities include:
- The reporting capability of the Velocix CDN has been extended to give operators greater visibility of the traffic flowing through the network without increasing any additional latency or load. Patented Bell Labs techniques are used to measure the quality of video streamed to customers without the need for network probes or for installing software on customers’ devices.
- Integration with the network routing control plane enables the CDN to learn automatically from changes in the IP infrastructure and optimize the cache selection accordingly. For example, when a new IP address is assigned to a user, the CDN adapts dynamically to make sure customers are always served from the optimal cache.
- The Velocix Universal Network Application Programming Interface (UNAPI) also enables unprecedented integration with external systems to develop customized applications for network configuration, content management and reporting.
- Velocix Proxy Language provides a powerful way to dynamically control how content is cached and processed. Using an industry standard programming language (LUA), a pay TV provider can modify how a request is treated depending, for example, on a user’s location or device. This opens up a wealth of personalization opportunities to improve the customer experience or traffic management on the network. It also allows a service provider to bring the web traffic for their pay TV service onto the same CDN as the video traffic.
