Motorola APEX1000 Installation And Operation Manual page 205

SimulCrypt General Overview
The APEX1000 allows a scheduling entity (EIS) to define scrambling control groups,
which define a set of services that require scrambling with a common key to be shared
by a set of conditional access systems. The APEX1000 then initiates the scrambling of
services requested at the specific activation time indicated by the EIS, using the
standard DVB-CSA scrambling algorithm, and based on a scrambling key that changes at
a configurable rate.
Note: The value for the Crypto Period depends on several factors, such as your
configuration, and the processing capabilities of different entities within the SimulCrypt
network.
Prior to initiating the scrambling, the APEX1000 provides the common scrambling key to
each of the ECMG entities configured for each conditional access system belonging to
the scrambling group. Each ECMG then generates and sends back an ECM or
entitlement control message to the APEX1000 (the APEX1000 requests a new ECM
every crypto period to each ECMG).
The APEX1000 will play out a modulated MPEG stream including the scrambled services
as well as the ECM information received from each conditional access system. Playing
of the ECMs is performed following the timing restrictions (delay-start, delay_stop, etc.)
as defined by each ECMG and negotiated at the initial communication.
The APEX1000 will also accept incoming data streams from EMMG entities from each
conditional access systems, carrying EMMs or entitlement management messages, and
will also insert this data into the output transport stream.
SimulCrypt Redundancy Support
For each Active ECMG channel configured in the APEX1000, it is possible to configure a
Backup ECMG channel (the Backup ECMG channel needs to be linked to the same CAS).
In the event of a failure situation with the active ECMG channel, the APEX1000 will
failover all the active ECM streams that were setup on the failing ECMG channel to the
(properly configured) corresponding Backup channel.
Note: You can configure one ECMG channel as a backup for several ECMG Active
channels.
After a failover of all streams from one Active ECMG channel to the configured Backup
ECMG channel (if the original ECMG channel happens to recover from the failure
situation), when the TCP connection and channel are re-established, the APEX1000
performs a failback operation, moving the streams back to the original ECMG.
If there is an Active ECMG channel failure and there is not a Backup ECMG channel
configured. or if the Backup ECMG channel also fails (even if there are other available
ECMG channels for the same CAS). then an outage to retrieve ECMs for the services
that were covered by such ECMG channel occurs, and subscriber impact would depend
on the Crypto Period Extension configuration.
SimulCrypt • Overview
APEX1000 All-Purpose Edge QAM Software Version 2.4.x • Installation and Operation Manual
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