Andre Beck

Blending telephony and IPTV: Building the TV-Link service package using the Alcatel-Lucent Service Broker™

This paper discusses the design and implementation of blended services—composite services whose base component services interact within a common control structure. The paper focuses on blended services that combine aspects of Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and IP Multimedia Subsystem–(IMS)-based telephony services and, in particular, focuses on a service that blends TV viewing and telephone call-handling functions. If a subscriber to this service receives a telephone call while watching TV, the caller ID is displayed on the subscribers TV screen and the subscriber can signal call control instructions using the set-top box remote control. In this service blend, functions from each base service are coordinated with actions in the other. The mechanism allowing this service is an information channel that allows status and control information to move between the subscribers set-top box and the IMS system. The services described in this paper are built upon a software foundation called the Alcatel-Lucent Service Broker™ platform, a platform that has unique capabilities to support such an information channel and to serve as the gateway between IMS and digital TV. This foundation offers service developers a set of important functions for the creation of blended services. Specifically, the Alcatel-Lucent Service Broker offers a means of controlling the invocation of base services, a means of communicating through different protocols, and support for large-scale deployment and for service customization.

HiFi: A Hierarchical Filtering Algorithm for Caching of Online Video

Online video presents new challenges to traditional caching with over a thousand fold increase in number of assets, rapidly changing popularity of assets and much higher throughput requirements. We propose a new hierarchical filtering algorithm for caching online video-HiFi. Our algorithm is designed to optimize hit-rate, replacement rate and cache throughput. It has an associated implementation complexity comparable to that of LRU. Our results show that under typical operator conditions, HiFi can increase edge cache byte hit-rate by 5-24% over an LRU policy, but more importantly can increase RAM or memory byte hit-rate by 80% to 200% and reduce replacement rate by 90%! These two factors combined can dramatically increase throughput for most caches. If SSDs are used for storage, the much lower replacement rate may also allow substitution of lower cost MLC based SSDs instead of SLC based SSDs. We extend previous multi-tier analytical models for LRU caches to caches with filtering. We develop a realistic simulation environment for online video using statistics from operator traces. We show that HiFi performs within a few percentage points from the optimal solution which was simulated by Beladys MIN algorithm under typical operator conditions.