QoS-guaranteed Mobile IPTV service in heterogeneous access networks

Internet Protocol Television is defined as a multimedia service delivered over IP-based networks supporting quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE), security, interactivity, and reliability. This service is rapidly expanding to both wireless and mobile networks through mobile devices. This trend demands a seamless IPTV service architecture for those mobile devices in heterogeneous access networks. This is because the convergence of the heterogeneous access networks can resolve their own service-coverage limitations, eliminating dead spots. We first briefly research on the background and trend for the seamless IPTV service for heterogeneous networks. Next we propose a new system architecture taking the relevant technical issues into account. This architecture is mainly composed of three parts, (i) information of network conditions on client, (ii) signaling for communicating between client and server with information of network conditions, and (iii) adaptive streaming based on information of network conditions. The proposed architecture can be deployed on any Internet protocol layers such as application layer, transport layer and network layer. In this paper, we evaluate two cases such as (i) RTSP in application layer and (ii) SCTP in transport layer and compare them through the performance evaluation. The results in the evaluation show that the proposed architecture meets well the requirements of the minimum IPTV service performance recommended by ITU-T international standard for the QoE over heterogeneous access networks. 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.