A secure and stable multicast overlay network with load balancing for scalable IPTV services

Abstract

The emerging multimedia Internet application IPTV over P2P network preserves significant advantages in scalability. IPTV media content delivered in P2P networks over public Internet still preserves the issues of privacy and intellectual property rights. In this paper, we use SIP protocol to construct a secure application-layer multicast overlay network for IPTV, called SIPTVMON. SIPTVMON can secure all the IPTV media delivery paths against eavesdroppers via elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange on SIP signaling and AES encryption. Its load-balancing overlay tree is also optimized from peer heterogeneity and churn of peer joining and leaving to minimize both service degradation and latency. The performance results from large-scale simulations and experiments on different optimization criteria demonstrate SIPTVMON's cost effectiveness in quality of privacy protection, stability from user churn, and good perceptual quality of objective PSNR values for scalable IPTV services over Internet. Copyright © 2012 Tsao-Ta Wei et al.