Advanced scheme to reduce IPTV channel zapping time

Abstract

IPTV just has been spread throughout the world. For the success of IPTV service, it is a key feature to satisfy QoS (Quality of Services) of total IPTV solution, such as tolerable channel zapping time. A related work reduces IPTV channel zapping time using a home gateway to take a role of IGMP-proxy. However, the related work considers the only case that a subscriber selects an adjacent channel of the current one. Additionally the related work requires a home gateway for each subscriber. In this paper, we propose a solution for the two problems using rating server without home gateway. Settop boxes instead of home gateways join or leave the adjacent channel groups for fast changes to the adjacent channels. Additionally settop boxes obtain an expected channel list by sending a query message to rating server and join the expected multicast groups in advance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.