The best practice architecture for live broadcast production
The broadcast industry is looking towards IP technology as the way to increase productivity. By sharing production equipment and staff, organizations can optimize their resources and reduce over-capacity. And as LAN and WAN networks converge, resources can also be shared across locations to achieve greater savings and flexibility.
But to fully utilize these benefits, getting the underlying on-prem network architecture right is essential. Over the years, organizations have adopted different setups, including a central IP router as one solution and segmented spine-leaf networks as another. But each architecture poses drawbacks to IP-based operations, pointing adopters towards a best-practice solution that shares the advantages of segmented spine-leaf deployments, but addresses its pitfalls at the same time.
The drawbacks of central routers
When IP was first introduced in live production, broadcasters tended to adopt a central IP router, or monolithic approach, that was reminiscent of baseband architecture. Under this strategy, all equipment is connected to this central router. But other than offering simplicity, it’s much less beneficial than alternative approaches.
Central router-based architectures offer no signal aggregation at the edge. This is not only problematic for resilience, but scalability is restricted as the router can act as a bottleneck - just like it does in the SDI world. Capacity and bandwidth constraints can arise from the all the ports being utilized. The only solution to increase capacity is to replace the router with a larger one, but this is costly and unsustainable. These issues mean that central router architectures have now largely been abandoned, with the exception of smaller networks such as OB trucks. Instead, the common architectures that are now used for live production LANs are based on spine-leaf topologies.
The pros and cons of segmented spine-leaf architectures
The first type of spine-leaf architecture commonly being adopted is a segmented variation. Segmented spine-leaf technologies, also known as red-blue networks, utilize core routers (the spine) and smaller edge routers (the leaves). Leaf routers are responsible for aggregation and connectivity, and the spine routers take care of inter-area connectivity.
In a segmented set-up, individual leaf routers are connected to one spine router. This approach effectively creates two networks which are designed to protect from failures. Connecting equipment to aggregating leaf routers also reduces the number of direct connections to central routers, simplifying fiber management and leading to fewer ports being needed. Scaling can then be achieved by adding spine or leaf routers to provide extra bandwidth capacity - avoiding costly rip-and-replace.
However, while the separation of red and blue networks offers a level of protection, equipment that doesn’t support multiple connections only integrates with one network. In this scenario, routing problems can arise from network failures and non-redundant equipment can become unreachable. In addition, this solution is inflexible in terms of load distribution and optimization of total network capacity, as those are effectively two separate networks. Expensive overcapacity is then required on both the blue and red sides of the network.
Shared spine-leaf solutions address these limitations.
Supporting a shared spine-leaf architecture
Shared spine-leaf architectures are often found in large data center operations, but they can equally be applied to broadcast studios, campuses and OB trucks. Much like the segmented spine-leaf architecture, leaf routers act as aggregators for the equipment, and spine routers act as distributors. The key difference is that in a shared spine-leaf setup, every leaf switch is connected to every spine switch. So rather than a red-blue, this type of network architecture is often referred to as the combination of these two colors, ie. purple.
Alongside the same scalability benefits presented by segmented spine-leaf architectures, shared spine-leaf networks remove any unique paths of traffic between pieces of equipment. This allows for redundancy and resiliency at a lower cost as all main connections back to a data center are duplicated, ensuring that no redundant or non-redundant endpoints are blocked by the loss of a single spine.
Shared spine-leaf technology also enables total network capacity to be used optimally. For example, instead of a network running at 30% on the blue side and 90% capacity on the red side, a shared architecture can achieve 60% overall. While a purple network is more complex to set up, this complexity can be hidden if the right control systems are incorporated.
A balanced and resilient solution for IP-driven live broadcast
The transition to IP-based infrastructure has opened the door to more efficient, flexible broadcast operations, but only if the underlying network architecture supports those ambitions. While central routers offered a straightforward starting point, their limitations around scalability have made them less viable in modern environments. Segmented spine-leaf architectures addressed some of these gaps, but they still present challenges in routing and optimizing network capacity.
Shared spine-leaf networks, by contrast, deliver a much more balanced and resilient solution. This architecture offers the flexibility to scale, the ability to optimize network capacity and the resiliency required for live production. As broadcast operations take the next step in their evolution, shared spine-leaf architectures provide the foundation for building reliable, high-performance IP networks.
[Editor's note: This is a contributed article from Nevion. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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