Vertical handover efficient transport for mobile IPTV

Abstract

The success of IPTV suggests that an expansion to mobile devices is likely. A key difference between IPTV delivery to mobile devices and broadband access is the possibility of vertical handovers, which can cause disruption to real-time video streaming. This paper proposes a lightweight form of IPTV transport based on negative acknowledgments. The performance of the scheme is analyzed in comparison to an industry-standard congestion controller and baseline UDP transport. A selective acknowledgment variation of the scheme is also examined. The paper shows both proposed schemes result in better mean video quality (by as much as 4 dB) but that the non-selective scheme is better in the presence of vertical handovers. The paper presents a case study which emulates an IPTV streaming architecture with handovers between IEEE 802.16e (WiMAX) broadband wireless and an 802.11 network. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.