Zebroid: using IPTV data to support STB-assisted VoD content delivery

Abstract

IPTV, unlike Internet TV, delivers digital TV and multimedia services over IP-based networks with the required level of quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE). Linear programming channels in IPTV are delivered through multicast, which is highly scalable with the number of subscribers. Video-on-demand (VoD) content, on the other hand, is typically delivered using unicast, which places a heavy load on the VoD servers and all the network components leading to the end-user set-top boxes (STBs) as the demand increases. With the rapid growth of IPTV subscribers and the shift in video viewing habits, the need to efficiently disseminate large volumes of VoD content has prompted IPTV service providers to consider the use of STBs to assist in video content delivery. This paper describes our current research work on Zebroid, a potential VoD solution for fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) networks, which uses IPTV data on a recurring basis to determine how to select, stripe, and preposition popular content in selected STBs during idle hours. A STB requesting VoD content during the peak hours can then receive necessary stripes from participating STBs in the neighborhood. Recent VoD request access patterns, STB availability data, and capacity data on network components are taken into consideration in determining the parameters used in the striping algorithm of Zebroid. We show both by simulation and emulation on a realistic IPTV testbed that the VoD server load can be reduced by more than 70% during peak hours by allocating only 8 GB of storage on each STB. The savings achieved through Zebroid would also allow IPTV service providers to add more linear programming channels without expensive infrastructure upgrades.

P2P Assisted Streaming for Low Popularity VoD Contents

“…This would contribute to increase the storage efficiency of the peers as well as the contents availability. Therefore, we divide the content items into strips [10], where each strip contains equidistant portions with a predetermined size that will depend on the minimum allowed initial delay. The distance between the portions is k multiple of portions, where k is the number of required peers for uninterrupted streaming.…”

“…In the second scenario, the clients are 7 capable of serving part of the requests for the low popularity content items. In order to compare the results of the proposed model and a related work [10], we consider the case when only the most popular contents are distributed on the STBs. We also include the scenario when both the popular and unpopular contents are equally distributed on the STBs.…”

“…Some of the reasons are that the set-top boxes (STBs) nowadays have considerable storage capacity and the operators have higher control over the devices on the clients premisses, avoiding the reliability issue of the classical P2P systems. Some solutions for the use of P2P in IPTV networks are presented in [7][8] [9] [10].…”

“…This would offload the backbone links of the network and would enable growth of the number of clients subscribed to VoD service without considerate changes and high costs in the core of the network. Despite the common practice to store the most popular contents in the peers for best traffic reduction [10], in our approach, we choose to store the low popularity contents in the peers, thus providing locally close availability of all the popularity range of the videos. We use this approach because the popular contents are already stored in the edge servers which are close to the clients.…”

Storage optimization for a peer-to-peer video-on-demand network

“…Instead, the system should try to preload desired data onto the set-top boxes and thus make all set-top boxes active participants in the P2P network even if they are not consuming P2P resources. Figure 4 shows the average number of requests from STB's during the entire 24 hour period [9]. We observe a lowload period between 2-8 AM where the graph reaches its lowest points.…”