QoS Supported IPTV Service Architecture over Hybrid-Tree-Based Explicit Routed Multicast Network

With the rapid advance in multimedia streaming and multicast transport technology, current IP multicast protocols, especially PIM-SM, become the major channel delivery mechanism for IPTV system over Internet. The goals for IPTV service are to provide two-way interactive services for viewers to select popular program channel with high quality for watching during fast channel surfing period. However, existing IP multicast protocol cannot meet above QoS requirements for IPTV applications between media server and subscribers. Therefore, we propose a cooperative scheme of hybrid-tree based on explicit routed multicast, called as HT-ERM to combine the advantages of shared tree and source tree for QoS-supported IPTV service. To increase network utilization, the constrained shortest path first (CSPF) routing algorithm is designed for construction of hybrid tree to deliver the high-quality video stream over watching channel and standard quality over surfing channel. Furthermore, the Resource Reservation Protocol- Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) is used as signaling mechanism to set up QoS path for multicast channel admission control. Our simulation results demonstrated that the proposed HT-ERM scheme outperforms other multicast QoS-based delivery scheme in terms of channel switching delay, resource utilization, and blocking ratio for IPTV service.