About Video Conferencing - Is Your Network Ready?

About video conferencing - Is your network ready?

Today, we are seeing more and more companies starting or already deploying video conferencing systems to save total cost and increase productivity. To this end, the IT department has to consider whether the quality of video conferencing can be guaranteed when the network is busy, whether the enterprise should build a private network for video conferencing, and how to handle it without losing performance and reliability. Streaming of video conferences and data.

In order to ensure the perfect preparation for application video conferencing, enterprises should first have a comprehensive and comprehensive understanding of WAN application traffic. Otherwise, the network administrator cannot clearly determine whether the enterprise network is suitable for video conference traffic, and whether the network bandwidth should be upgraded to avoid performance problems when the WAN bandwidth is insufficient. If the network administrator can clearly understand how much bandwidth the application needs, how much bandwidth is needed to optimize video conferencing traffic across the WAN, and how much traffic is in the application layer. They can separate those important application traffic, control and contain unnecessary application traffic, or increase the bandwidth based on the improved video conferencing service quality to meet the needs of enterprises.

When using traditional routers to manage network edges, MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) has certain limitations in monitoring application traffic within the local network and taking appropriate traffic control, and may cause network edges to become critical video conferencing and data. The blocked point of transmission. But there is nothing that can be done. Excellent application delivery technologies should be able to combine MPLS on their own devices or with edge routers, adding appropriate tags to video conferencing and data application traffic, ahead of time at the edge of the network. Traffic is optimized. This is precisely the network administrator's concern about MPLS limitations. This technology minimizes the number of congestions in video conferencing and data traffic and achieves service level agreement (SLA) goals. At the same time, application delivery network solutions should be able to compress data applications based on traffic types with intelligent compression technology, helping companies reduce bandwidth consumption and ensure that voice and video traffic that requires high quality assurance is not compressed.

With the improvement of video conferencing quality and cost reduction, video conferencing is favored by distributed enterprises. However, the interface between the LAN and the WAN has become the main location that causes network congestion and affects the quality of the conference. When we identified the bandwidth requirements and gained visibility into all applications, we had to further consider three issues that could seriously affect the quality of the conference, such as delay, delay jitter, and packet loss.

For video conferencing, especially for two-way meetings, latency can lead to a drop in user experience. But just ensuring that video conferencing packets get higher priority than other traffic while waiting to enter the network is obviously not enough, because it is like a crowded highway, the first position does not mean it can be very Get to your destination quickly. What really should be done is to categorize all video conferencing-related protocols more rigorously and intelligently, ensuring that the appropriate bandwidth is allocated for each traffic type.

Compared to delayed AC lag and speech collisions, delay jitter is caused by the various unpredictable delays that each video conferencing packet encounters during transmission. Usually, when using a jitter buffer or queue to temporarily save and then "smooth output" voice and video data packets, the jitter should not exceed 100ms, otherwise the problem will be worse. If you can add more intelligent and policy-based bandwidth control strategies based on traditional methods, and allocate and maintain a certain speed and quality for data traffic and voice and video traffic, you can solve this problem.

Video conferences often face packet loss. When the packet loss rate reaches or exceeds 3%, the conference audience will obviously feel that the conference is intermittent or even dropped. The best way to solve this problem is to intelligently control the IP network, minimize IP congestion and unpredictability in the existing WAN link, maximize application performance, and achieve unmatched flow control and performance optimization.

In addition, video conferencing can affect network and application performance from time to time, because the different protocols used operate differently in the network, and the more random interactive applications make data types and required bandwidth more difficult to predict in advance. More companies are beginning to focus on intelligent solutions, and the visibility, control and acceleration capabilities of application delivery technologies undoubtedly provide strong support for this intelligence.

In summary, an excellent application delivery solution can address network congestion and resulting delay, jitter, and packet loss issues for video conferencing applications, thereby avoiding video conferencing at the LAN and WAN junctions. The quality is lost.