With the increasing collaboration between Fixed Broadband (FBB) and Mobile Broadband (MBB) and popularity of smart terminals in the multi-screen era, people have growing demands for the video service, and more industries and enterprises choose video as the media for their self-use services. Driven by the explosive video demands and rapidly innovated Internet technologies, the video service is under rapid development and constant innovation across the globe, and we are witnessing this "Big Video" era. As the SNL report 2016 shows, the global Pay TV users amounted to 957 million as of the end of 2015, and this figure is expected to be 1.15 billion by 2020. Ultra clear, ultra vivid and ultra smooth become the main features of the video service.
User experience is the core of video service development. In the completion with the Internet OTT video service, telecom operators' network resources had not given the traditional video service a competitive edge. In the Big Video era, ultra high-definition videos such as 4K, 8K, VR and AR have higher requirements for the network quality and service broadband. Telecom operators can introduce an iCDN-based intelligent content pipeline to provide the video service with higher quality and better user experience, thus maximizing their advantages of network resources and enhancing competitive differentiation. This is a key for telecom operators to take initiative and maintain the leading position.
China Mobile faces challenges and opportunities during its strategic transformation of traffic operation and digital services. To build a content network, it needs to address problems such as comprehensively improving user experience of content accessing, increasing the utilization of bearer network resources, assuring the sound development of self-operated services, and achieve automated content distribution and centralized traffic scheduling. ZTE's integrated CDN solution (iCDN) provides a fast, secure and stable content distribution service and management services to speed up response to user requests and increase the utilization of network resources, thus enhancing telecom operators' operation capability and control of their network resources. The ZTE iCDN can bear various services including telecom operators' self-operated services (IPTV and OTT) as well as third-party Internet services (video/Web/application/file acceleration and other value-added services) to realize "one-point access, whole-network service", which increases the utilization of system resources and maximize the value.
China Mobile Guangxi Branch is playing catch-up with its competitors on the broadband service and the video service. It is vigorously implementing China Mobile's "And Home" strategy to develop the video service. Meanwhile, through the iCDN, it provides the Internet acceleration service to strengthen its competiveness in the industry. However, it meets the following challenges:
1. Efficient transmission of ultra high-definition video streaming requires a more efficient iCDN transmission technology.
2. To process high-concurrency requests, a high-performance iCDN redirection server is needed.
3. To break other operators' monopoly of current Internet resources, an iCDN should be built asap to introduce Internet resources and improve user experience.
The iCDN system of ZTE's Big Video full solution provides integrated content acceleration function that supports accelerating Web, Internet video, operators' self-operated video service and value-added services. It assists operators in reducing OPEX and CAPEX and substantially improving user experience, thus enhancing competitiveness strength and increasing revenues.
With years of dedication to the multimedia communication domain, ZTE has profound technical strength. It came up with several technical innovations for delivering the iCDN project to China Mobile Guangxi Branch:
1. Optimized network processing efficiency, improving concurrent packet processing capability to meet bit rate requirement.
2. Unique memory mechanism, eliminating the performance bottleneck due to insufficient memory during frequent requests for memory releasing.
3. Efficient message queuing algorithm, increasing packet receiving efficiency and CPU utilization.
4. Optimized HTTP parsing, reducing packet loss.
Now China Mobile Guangxi Branch has put the ZTE iCDN system into application, and has gained the iCDN's advantages of efficiency and intensive management:
1. Increased efficiency: The system processing performance is doubled and its caching capability increased by 10%.
2. Saved resources: For example, when processing a 2G message data, the server integration level is doubled, with a saving rate up to 70%, which saves a lot of rack space.
3. Enhanced control of content: The optimized caching architecture effectively enhances the Internet operation capability, which is worth promoting widely.