IKUSI FLOW Network requirements

 Latency and bandwidth considerations

• Maximum latency allowed to ensure a quality signal should be 50ms. 
• The limitation on the number of services is the network bandwidth itself. 6 Mbps for each Standard Definition (SD) service is a fair estimation. 
• Our recommendation is to use Gigabit Ethernet backbone and Fast Ethernet for the user segment. 
• The traffic is multicast IPTV, and it is managed by the IGMP protocol. This means that, if for instance there are 20 different users watching the same exact service, it will only consume as 1 for the backbone switch. 
• The Video on Demand (VoD) required bandwidth must be taken into account for sizing purposes as well. Consider 8-12 Mbps for each user watching a VoD High Definition (HD) channel.

Network devices 

Distribution switches must support IGMP Snooping feature, otherwise multicast traffic will be treated as broadcast, causing network congestion problems. 

Backbone switch must also have IGMP Querier. This feature responds Set-Top-Box (STB) requests to join specific multicast groups. 

In addition, every switch must ensure the quality of service (QoS) if there are different types of dat packets in the network using the following: 802.1Q (VLAN), 802.1P (QoS MAC) and DiffServ. 

Network cabling 

CAT5E (minimum) 

CAT6 (recommended) 

FIBER (if > 100m)

Sample switch configuration 

In order to have some reference, this is the standard configuration for Multicast support of an Allied Telesys 8000S/XX backbone switch:

bridge 

multicast 

filtering 

ip igmp 

snooping 

interface 

vlan 1 

ip igmp snooping 

exit 

interface range ethernet all 

bridge multicast 

unregistered 

filtering exit 

interface vlan 1 

ip igmp snooping querier enable 

ip igmp snooping querier address   = The actual IP address of your switch 

exit 

interface vlan 1 

ip address 

<IP>

255.255.0.0 

exit 

ip default-gateway 10.1.1.1 

interface range ethernet e(1-XX) XX = 24 or 48 

spanning-tree portfast 

Sample network diagram