FourthWall, a provider of cable set-top box viewing data, said the U.S. Patent office has approved a patent for its Velox bandwidth management and optimization technologies: Network Bandwidth Regulation Using Traffic Scheduling.
Velox, the vendor said, makes second-by-second data collection possible on the full range of set-top boxes deployed by U.S. cable operator, and takes care of two critical functions in data transmission in the cable network infrastructure: guaranteed data delivery and bandwidth management.
FourthWall said those elements are particularly important in environments where the return data path is a valuable and scarce resource as it’s shared by other system components and applications. Velox, the vendor said, guarantees the data transmission within this network, overcoming some of the shortcomings of the less reliable UDP (User Datagram Protocol) transmission, and uses predictive scheduling and coordination to regulate and optimize bandwidth use on the limited upstream return channel while preventing dangerous bandwidth spikes.
“With the volume of data sent from the set-top box including viewership data and diagnostic information, Velox is a critical technology in collecting this information in a timely, reliable manner. The result is a complete, usable dataset that can benefit all television stakeholders,” said FourthWall chief scientist and co-founder Dr. Louis Slothouber, in a statement.
