Bandwidth Management in Wireless Home Networks for IPTV Solutions

The optimal allocation of the retransmission bandwidth is essential for IPTV service providers to ensure maximal service quality. This paper highlights the relevance of the wireless transport in today’s IPTV solution and discusses how this new media affects the existing broadcast technologies. A new Markovian channel model is developed to address the optimization issues of the retransmission throughput, and a new method is presented which is evaluated by empirical measurements followed by mathematical analysis. 1. Preface The terminology of Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) specification release 2 [1] has been chosen to describe the internet protocol television IPTV features in this paper because we experience a wide diversity of terms in several journals which may confuse the reader. We believe that the OIPF terms are straightforward, and they can be easily interpreted on any IPTV solutions although our work is independent from the standard itself. 2. Motivation The telecommunication industry is tardily changing. The emerging market of the new generation over-the-top (OTT) services from Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon had put a big pressure on operators to move away from the traditional telecom model and assess threats and opportunities from OTT players. There is a big race for the customers today, and legacy industry has to extend its portfolio with various value adding services like triple-play, rich communication, or mobile payment. This paper evaluates one specific topic of this competition, the video broadcasting services. We have observed the rapid evolution of the IPTV services in the last decade. The high-definition broadcast got popular since its introduction in 2004, and the accessibility of 3D content is growing year by year. The consumer electronic devices become integrated part of our life, customers access digital content from set-top boxes (STBs) to tablets and mobile devices. From the IPTV service provider point of view, the demand of high-quality services emerged; however, the infrastructure of the access network remained the same. The main technology of telecommunication operators providing internet remained the 20–30 years old twisted copper pairs. On one hand, the IPTV Service Providers are motivated by the maximization of their customer reach, but in many cases digital subscriber line xDSL offers inadequate bandwidth for high quality services [1]. access network providers need to find a solution which enables them to utilize their current infrastructure. The answers may include the implementation of a more advanced encoding algorithm