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Abstract
The advances in broadband Internet access and scalable video technologies
have made it possible for Internet Protocol television (IPTV) to become the next
killer application for modern Internet carriers in metropolitan areas.
Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is a system through which digital
television service is delivered using the architecture and networking methods of
the Internet Protocol Suite over a packet-switched network infrastructure, e.g.,
the Internet and broadband Internet access networks, instead of being delivered
through traditional radio frequency broadcast, satellite signal, and cable
television (CATV) formats.
IPTV services may be classified into three main groups: live television, time-
shifted programming, and content (or video) on demand. It is distinguished from
general Internet-based or web-based multimedia services by its on-going
standardization process (e.g., ETSI) and preferential deployment scenarios in
subscriber-based telecommunications networks with high-speed access
channels into end-user premises via set-top boxes or other customer-premises
equipment.
In this article we have a short history of television in then we discuss about new
generation of television that is Internet protocol television (IPTV).
We will discuss advantages and limitations of IPTV and some challenges in p2p
stream, Wimax and compression format of IPTV
Introduction
Since the 1950’s, television has been a dominant and pervasive mass media.
Over the years, television has transformed itself into a new media. The number
of channels has increased from a few free-to-air broadcasts to several hundreds
for cable, satellite, and Internet TV networks that transmit more channels to each
user.
IPTV is the most emerging service these days and its standardization efforts are
very active. Globally, IPTV subscribers are about 24 million and expected to grow
dramatically. It is very likely to say that IPTV is a just television on the IP. But,
ITU-T defines IPTV as multimedia services such as television/video/
audio/text/graphics/data delivered over IP based networks managed to provide
the required level of QoS/QoE, security, interactivity and reliability. Actually,
scope of IPTV covers researches on IP based networks and managed
capabilities as well as multimedia service over IP network.
IPTV, as an operator service over broadband networks, has been available for
sometime. Figure 1 shows the anticipated increase in traffic over broadband
access networks. This increase will largely be driven by IPTV service.
Figure1
Figure2
Triple play
IPTV can easily be bundled with broadband Internet service and VoIP services
to offer what is popularly known as Triple Play.
The commercial bundling of IPTV, VoIP and Internet access is referred to as a
Triple Play. This means the service is all set to pose a significant challenge to the
established cable and satellite services.
In US, Triple Play services are offered by cable television operators as well as by
telecommunication operators. Triple Play implies high-speed Internet, television
(Video on Demand or regular broadcasts) and telephone service over a single
broadband connection. With wireless, it's called Quadruple Play and grouped
services (triple and quadruple) are called multi-play.
Figure3
Now, let us take a look at what makes IPTV and Internet Television different. To
differentiate these two models is in general quite challenging. But studying and
analyzing the said concepts in depth explains the differences.
Advantages of IPTV
The quality of digital video and audio is much better compared with the
traditional analogue TV. With additional features, it can become interactive. For
example, viewers may be able to look up a player’s history while watching a
game. They also may be able to schedule a recording of their favorite program
when they are not home. With video on demand, they can browse an online
movie catalogue and watch the movies instantly.
Because IPTV uses standard networking protocols, it promises lower costs for
operators and lower prices for users. Using set-top boxes with broadband
internet connections, video can be streamed to households more efficiently than
cable.
Because each IP television viewer has a unique address, this allows advertising
messages to be sent to specific viewers (addressable advertising). The ability to
direct advertising messages to specific target audiences (addressable
advertising) is more valuable to companies than traditional broadcast advertising
and this may result in reduced viewing costs.
Another advantage of IPTV is that if the customer has quadruple play (internet,
television, telephone, mobile phone service) with the same company, the cell
phone can be used to schedule the recording of a program. Excluding cell phone
service and having only three services with a company is referred to as triple play.
The biggest difference with today’s distribution of television is that you choose
which information you want to have everything is not broadcasted as with
terrestrial, cable and satellite. Another big difference is that you will be able to
have a high capacity two way communication and have the ability to interact with
the service provider, for example you request a movie from your TV-guide and
the program is delivered to you. Other things that could be provided with IPTV is
interactive applications (e.g. video blog) or transactional applications (e.g. TV
shopping). Because of the point-to-point connection IPTV offers, every user will
be able to view their own individual broadcasts. You will be able to have
VoD(Video on Demand) which is your on personal video store where you can
decide when you want to see the movie. EPG(Electronic Program Guide) and
PVR(Personal Video Recorder), where the EPG will be fully interactive with your
own personal needs. You will also be able to use features like pause, fast
forward and rewind when you are watching a movie on your TV. It will be
possible to have personalized advertising. You will be able to decide yourself,
which kind of advertising you would like to see.
IPTV Features
• Selection: users are able to select their TV programs with fast channel selection
and short channel changing time.
• Storage: TV programs are stored in local storage devices so that users can
watch them anytime; furthermore, service providers should store at least 100
hours of TV programs and videos.
• QoS: QoS must be guaranteed; a standard definition TV and a high definition
TV need bandwidth of 1~4 Mb/s and 4~12 Mb/s, respectively.
• Low cost: cost to the user must be low; this is the key to success
Limitations of IPTV
There are some limitations to IPTV. According to Wikipedia, because IPTV is
based on the Internet Protocol, it is sensitive to packet loss and delays if the
IPTV connection is not fast enough and it also does not support HDTV at the
moment. AT&T is currently experimenting with HDTV and its U-Verse service in
the Houston area according to Cable Industry Insider.
The networks have to be built so that the End-to-End QoS can be guaranteed,
which is not the case with most of the networks today. Set-top boxes are
expensive and if you want to watch another channel on a different TV you will
have to buy another box.
Table2
H.264/AVC Benefits
• Doubles compression efficiency, lowering bit rates to half of the MPEG-2
requirements for high-quality video and decreasing necessary storage capacity
• Allows more content to be transmitted over existing infrastructures using its
lower bit rates.
• Lowers transmission costs by sending the same information in half the time.
• Lowers deployment costs with new H.264/AVC technology platforms built on
standards-based, non-proprietary processing hardware.
• Incorporates a Network Adaptation Layer that offers flexibility through
transportability over packet and bit stream networks, allowing easy upgrades to
existing MPEG-2-based delivery solutions.
• Maintains a high level of viewer experience in packet and wireless bit stream
networks through error resilience.
• Uses a common set of technologies between mobile and IPTV
• Uses multiple reference frame
Figure 4
MGS coding-based IPTV stream
H.264 MGS coding scheme supports the flexible adaptation of video quality
under bandwidth fluctuation by using a hierarchical layer structure. In the
following, every IPTV channel stream is assumed to be encoded in two streams,
i.e. BL (Base Layer) and EL (Enhancement Layer) stream. BL stream includes
the information required for displaying the minimum quality video, and EL stream
allows some loss of quality refinement packets but it cannot be used alone.
When some parts of EL stream are available together with BL stream,
subscribers are able to watch better quality video by combining both of them.
In the proposed system, H.264 MGS coding scheme is applied to each GOP
(Group of Pictures). BL stream is encoded at a fixed bit-rate and transmitted by
using the sparsest modulation scheme and the lowest coding rate at the PHY
layer to provide IPTV service of minimum quality to as many subscribers as
possible. Actually, the BL stream rate is one of the main parameters. On the
other hand, some parts of EL stream are transmitted from the BS according to
the selected MCS (modulation and coding scheme) as shown in figure 5
Figure 5
P2P IPTV
With the success of P2P file sharing, new emerging P2P applications arise on
the Internet for streaming content like voice (VoIP) or live video (IPTV).
Nowadays, there are lots of works measuring P2P file sharing or P2P telephony
systems, but there is still no comprehensive study about P2P IPTV, whereas it
should be massively used in the future. A significant problem in providing IPTV
services is its high deployment and maintenance cost. In addition, the capacity of
the video servers can quickly become a bottleneck. One solution to alleviate the
load on servers is to use peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. While early P2P systems
were mostly used for file downloading, recently there have been several efforts
on using the peer-to-peer approach to support live streaming and VOD streaming
Figure6
In P2P IPTV, end-hosts are responsible to duplicate flows to each other. End-
hosts are not entities dedicated to stay in the networks all time: they can join or
leave the network whenever they want and are prone to suffer failures. P2P IPTV
systems have to deal with the arrivals and departures of peers (churn of peer). It
is a challenging issue because live video has to respect playback instant to get
smooth playback quality. A high churn of peers will involve additional delays or
jitter variations for packet delivery, which will decrease overall video quality. In
this section, we show the video peers lifetime to point out the churn of peers.
Since our nodes have only a local view of all the peers in the network, the video
peer lifetime is the duration between the first time and the last time our controlled
nodes exchange video traffic with another peer.
Physical layer
WiMAX network supports several transmission modes at the physical layer, i.e.
SC (Single Carrier) mode, OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex)
mode, and OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) mode. In
the OFDM system, FEC coding is applied to the transmitted data stream for error
resilience (i.e. more robust FEC coding provides stronger error protection). RS
concatenated with CC (Convolutional Code) coding is mandatory for all WiMAX
network implementations. The standard optionally supports CTC and LDPC
(Low-Density Parity Check) codes. Then a resulting data stream is divided into
multiple parallel low rate data streams. Each low rate data stream is mapped to
an individual data subcarrier and modulated using some sort of PSK (Phase Shift
Keying) or QAM(Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) such as BPSK (Binary Phase
Shift Keying), QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying), 16QAM, and 64QAM. In
fact, modulation is the process of translating a data stream into a form suitable
for transmission on the physical medium, and its performance is measured by the
ability to preserve the accuracy of the encoded data. Subcarriers are distributed
into several groups, which are called sub-channels. Sub-channels may be
configured by using contiguous subcarriers or pseudo-randomly distributed
subcarriers over the frequency spectrum. Sub-channels formed by using pseudo-
randomly distributed subcarriers provide improved frequency diversity and are
particularly useful for mobile applications. Representative combinations of
modulation and coding rate of the WiMAX network is given in Table 3.
Table3
MAC layer
In general, MAC, sub-layer of Data Link layer, supports addressing and channel
access control mechanisms for network nodes or terminals to communicate
within a network. MAC of the WiMAX network is operated in a centrally controlled
manner, i.e. the resource allocation is dynamically managed by BS. Fig. 1
represents the OFDMA frame structure in TDD (Time Division Duplex)
implementation.
The medium is divided into continuous MAC frames in time and sub-channels.
Each MAC frame is configured by DL (DownLink) and UP (UpLink) sub-frames.
At the beginning of each MAC frame, the BS transmits DL Map and UL Map into
the DL subframe. These maps provide resource allocation and other control
information for DL and UL sub-frames, respectively. In each frame, TTG (Tx/Rx
Transmission Gap) and RTG (Rx/Tx Transmission Gap) are inserted between
the DL and UL sub-frames, which are time gaps between transmission and
reception.
The minimum resource allocation unit is called a slot, which is configured by one
sub-channel over one, two, or three OFDM symbols depending on the subcarrier
permutation scheme. A burst is a contiguous series of slots assigned to a given
subscriber and different MCS (Modulation and Coding Scheme) can be applied
to it. Transmission rate on the slot is dependent on associated MCS and a
tradeoff exists between link robustness and throughput. In other words, the BER
(Bit Error Rate) performance which suffers from fading and shadowing in wireless
channels is improved at the cost of bandwidth efficiency, as modulation becomes
sparserand coding rate lower. In contrast, denser modulation and higher coding
rate provide higher data rates on the slot and increase sensibility against wireless
channel error.
Conclusion
Television has long been a dominant and pervasive mass media and its
viewing behavior has many important implications on the video distribution
networks and systems. With the increasing popularity of Internet services,
multimedia consumption patterns could change significantly over the coming
years. However, the average time spent on watching television remains
significant despite the uptake of broadband services. In fact, we expect TV to
remain a crucial mass media in the future as it integrates many innovations in the
Internet and as well as in the mobile space.
With WiMAX offering high data rates to both mobile and fixed users, and the
desire of users to watch real-time TV or VoD services make the implementation
of IPTV over WiMAX an exciting killer application. Realization of IPTV will enable
users to have VoD services as well as to subscribe whichever channel of their
choice giving them the great deal of flexibility.
IPTV is a technology that is now causing widespread disruption across the whole
telecoms market place. Many of the world’s major telecommunications providers
are exploring IPTV as a new opportunity from their existing markets and they are
treating it as a defensive measure against many conventional cable television
services entering into the market. Previously known as phone companies, the
telcos now want to turn a “triple play” of voice, data and video through the IPTV.
Finally “IPTV is an emerging technology that would evolve into a completely
interactive experience in the future”.
REFERENCES
[1] wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Technology of China
Hefei, P. R. China 230027
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IPTV Services?”
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Joseph Zhang_, and Ranesh Muththaiah ,” Wireless IPTV over WiMAX:
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