Exploiting the in-network capabilities of multicast to discover proximate iptv channels

Abstract

IPTV has become the next generation of television due, in part, to its ability to support features that have been lacking in conventional broadcasting—for example, end-user interactivity, personalisation and localisation. Providers are also searching for the most efficient delivery methods to provide the greatest amount of contents at the lowest cost. At present IPTV uses IP multicast to deliver live TV channels in an over-provisioned walled-garden network due to issues of deploying multicast and QoS challenges in the public Internet. However, IPTV is likely to shift into some parts of the public Internet in the future as a managed service. Multicast routing is performed on a per-session destination-address basis so each router maintains a table of all of the multicast addresses to which the content is being forwarded. We exploit this information to discover and join the in-progress channels of geographically proximate users and to create a new incentivised premium service in future IPTV networks called ProxyTV. This approach is expected to minimise network bandwidth requirements as it enables ISPs to optimise bandwidth on their edge networks. This becomes increasingly significant as TV content consumes more and more bandwidth, especially with the onset of HD and 3D capabilities. In this paper, we have presented in detail the concept with the results of a survey and an analysis of network traffic to justify the proposed approach.