IPTV Delivery Networks

Chapter 4Content Awareness in IPTV Delivery Networks

Suliman Mohamed Fati and Putra Sumari

4.1 Introduction

With the massive development in networking and multimedia, IPTV has recently become popular as a promising trend in home and business entertainment due to the increasing number of IP-network users. Therefore, IPTV, as a promising technology, has been growing rapidly in terms of subscribers and revenue, and is likely to become, in the near future, the standard means of delivering home and business entertainment content (Yarali and Cherry, 2005). Thus, telecommunication companies have entered a fierce competition to increase their customer base and profit by providing IPTV services (Lee, Muntean and Smeaton, 2009; Li and Wu, 2010; Yarali and Cherry, 2005). IPTV is globally considered a dominant technology in distributing high-quality videos and live channels anytime anywhere in a challenging environment. This challenging environment tends to deliver a hybrid IPTV service over an IP-based network infrastructure to end-users with different preferences and demands (Aldana Diaz and Guh, 2011; Montpetit, Klym and Blain, 2010; Montpetit, Klym and Mirlacher, 2011).

Currently, IPTV service providers consider the IPTV content popularity distribution and/or user preferences to allocate IPTV content (Dukes and Jones, 2004; Sujatha et al., 2008; Lie, Lui and Golubchik, 2000; Little and Venkatesh, 1994; Sobe, Elmenreich and Böszörmenyi, 2010), balance the network workload (Huang and ...