Ensuring Optimal Quality for Video Surveillance and Video Conferencing with TWAMP Active Monitoring

For business use cases, video surveillance and video conferencing are two critical real-time video scenarios in today’s digital world. Whether for security, remote work, or virtual events, the performance of these video systems can significantly impact user experience and operational efficiency. This is where TWAMP (Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol) active monitoring comes into play as a powerful tool to ensure optimal quality and performance.

What is TWAMP

TWAMP is the de facto protocol used for measuring performance metrics in today’s data networks. Unlike passive monitoring, which only observes traffic, TWAMP actively sends test packets across the network to gather data on latency, jitter, packet loss, and other critical performance indicators. This active monitoring technique provides real-time insights into the network health, enabling proactive management and troubleshooting. For more information on TWAMP, refer to our earlier articles introducing TWAMP for active monitoring in 5G networks, efficient multi-vendor monitoring with TWAMP, typical findings in live networks using TWAMP active monitoring, and the last in this topic series: Advanced TWAMP Monitoring Techniques for 5G Networks.

The Importance of TWAMP in Video Surveillance

Maintaining high video quality and minimizing downtime is critical for video surveillance. Surveillance cameras need to transmit high-resolution video data reliably to ensure effective monitoring and recording. Any degradation in video quality, delays, or data loss can compromise security and surveillance effectiveness.

By deploying a TWAMP monitoring solution, you can:

• Proactively identify issues. In many cases, the video surveillance feeds are not actively monitored. Therefore, it can take a long time before possible video issues are identified. With active monitoring, the TWAMP monitoring system will continuously ensure that the video feeds meet the quality criteria and inform you if there are any issues

• Optimize network resources. With active monitoring, you get visibility into the performance of your video feeds and you can optimize network resources and bandwidth utilization for optimal video delivery.

• Efficiently troubleshoot. The TWAMP monitoring system will maintain a history of the measurement data and provide you with insightful reports to help identify and locate the root cause for the issues. When you are using a third-party provider for the video transport, it also helps to prove to your provider when and how serious issues you have encountered.
• Ensure Service Level Agreement (SLA) Compliance. More advanced active TWAMP monitoring systems will also have the capabilities to calculate daily, weekly, or monthly SLA reports to verify that your third-party connectivity provider has delivered the promised transmission quality.

The Importance of TWAMP for Web Conferencing

In the context of a significant increase in remote work, web conferencing has grown in importance. Maintaining a smooth uninterrupted video call experience with good voice quality is crucial. Poor video and voice quality and dropped calls lead to frustration and decreased productivity and eventually cause increased churn for the operator.

For web conferencing, an active TWAMP monitoring solution can help you to:

• Improve user experience. Since you can identify performance issues with the TWAMP monitoring solution, you can fine-tune your network performance to ensure high-quality video and audio streams resulting in a better user experience with fewer interruptions and clearer communication.

• Optimize network performance. You get visibility into the network performance and conditions, you may adjust bandwidth allocations, and implement Quality and Service policies to prioritize conferencing traffic.

• Reduce downtime. With active monitoring, you can identify potential network failures and performance degradations before they impact users. This leads to reduced downtime and a more reliable web conferencing service.

What to Monitor

The most important KPIs to monitor are packet loss, jitter, and latency. These key performance indicators will have different impacts depending on the traffic type.

• Packet loss. Has a severe impact on both video surveillance traffic and video conferencing. Video conferencing is more sensitive as voice traffic is very sensitive to packet loss. A modern voice compression algorithm will compress a lot of voice information into one packet. Typical performance targets for packet loss are to keep it below 0.1% for video conferencing and below 1% for video surveillance.

• Latency. Indicates how long it takes for the packet to get from the sender to the receiver. Again, video conferencing is typically more interactive while many video surveillance use cases are not that sensitive to higher delays. For video conferencing, it is recommended to keep the delay below 100 milliseconds, while for video surveillance it is something between 150-500 milliseconds depending on the use case.

• Jitter. It is defined as the latency variation between two subsequent packets. Both video surveillance and conferencing are sensitive to jitter since a play-out buffer is used on the client side to ensure there is enough data buffered so that the decoder of the video traffic does not ”starve”. For both traffic types, it is recommended to keep end-to-end jitter in the 20-30 millisecond range.

Conclusion

In a world where digital communication and surveillance are becoming increasingly vital, the importance of maintaining high-quality video streams cannot be overstated. TWAMP active monitoring provides a robust solution for ensuring optimal network performance, which is critical for both video surveillance and web conferencing applications. By leveraging TWAMP combined with an efficient monitoring solution you can ensure that you keep latency, jitter, and packet loss below recommended levels at all times resulting in enhanced user experience, increased reliability, and optimized network performance for your video communications and surveillance systems.