Video Contents Prior Storing Server for Optical Access Network

One of the most important multimedia applications is Internet protocol TV (IPTV) for next-generation networks. IPTV provides triple-play services that require high-speed access networks with the functions of multicasting and quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Among optical access networks, Ethernet passive optical networks (EPONs) are regarded as among the best solutions to meet higher bandwidth demands. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for multicasting live IPTV traffic in optical access network. The proposed mechanism involves assigning a unique logical link identifier to each IPTV channel. To manage multicasting, a prior storing server in the optical line terminal (OLT) and in each optical network unit (ONU) is constructed. In this work, we propose a partial prior storing strategy that considers the changes in the popularity of the video content segments over time and the access patterns of the users to compute the utility of the objects in the prior storage. We also propose to partition the prior storage to avoid the eviction of the popular objects (those not accessed frequently) by the unpopular ones which are accessed with higher frequency. The popularity distribution and ageing of popularity are measured from two online datasets and use the parameters in simulations. Simulation results show that our proposed architecture can improve the system performance and QoS parameters in terms of packet delay, jitter and packet loss.