IP Operations and Management

Abstract

Recently many new IPTV providers have appeared, typically telephone and broadband companies, that now distribute scheduled TV channels, sometimes high-definition TV and video-on-demand (VoD) over IP in their own network. From a network management perspective, distribution of IPTV can be seen as a scheduling problem with the network links and storage facilities as resources and the objective to balance the overall load in the network. We show that scheduling and optimisation techniques can be used to make the distribution of IPTV more efficient by pushing content out to caches in the network to the right place at the right time.