A hybrid user authentication protocol for mobile IPTV service

IPTV, a technological convergence that combines communication and broadcasting technologies, delivers customized, interactive TV content and other multimedia information over wired and wireless connections. Providing secure access to IPTV services calls for authentication, without proper and secure authentication mechanisms, an individual impersonating a subscriber could steal a service. This paper proposes a new authentication protocol to authenticate IPTV users. The authors based the proposed protocol, a hybrid authentication protocol providing lightweight, personalized user authentication, on RFID (radio-frequency identification) and USIM (Universal Subscriber Identity Module) technologies. In the proposed protocol, USIM performs highly personalized authentication, and the authenticated subscriber’s RFID tags can have a temporary authority to execute authentication. These RFID tags become Agent Tags authorized to authenticate subscribers. Agent Tags identify and authenticate themselves to RFID readers in the set-top box, thus, simplifying the authentication process.     

A design of IPTV conditional access mechanism based on P2P network

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) technology. In this paper, we propose a conditional access mechanism to protect the copyright in P2P IPTV service. It enables large-scale distribution of copyrighted video using P2P streaming technology. The security and efficiency of IPTV service can be guaranteed in our design.     

Modeling and evaluating IPTV applications in WiMAX networks

Internet Protocol-based Television (IPTV) is a digital television service which delivers television content via an IP network. The rapid growth of wireless network technology in recent years has changed, the way people access the Internet. Adding mobility to IPTV can create a truly compelling ubiquitous service which spans different network domains and varied IP-enabled terminals and devices, such as set-top boxes, PCs and cell phones. However, extending IPTV service to wireless networks requires overcoming bandwidth bottlenecks and high packet loss rates. Following the IEEE 802.16 standard, worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) features high data rates and large service coverage, offering a wireless broadband solution for IPTV services. While previous research has focused on creating a broadband IPTV service few studies have practically evaluated IPTV applications in a wireless broadband network environment. In this paper, we model and evaluate a common constant bit rate (CBR)¹ based IPTV application and an IPTV live streaming (PPStreaming)² application while retrieving IPTV content via a WiMAX network. We also use the NS2 simulation tool to evaluate the performance of these two IPTV applications. The evaluation metrics include latency, packet loss, data rate and throughput statistics when the two IPTV applications are run in the WiMAX network. ¹The simplest IPTV solution is to convey video content by CBR. IPTV operators and content delivery networks relay CBR streaming content to control the demand for network capacity. Broadcasters prefer CBR video as it conserves bandwidth resources, but CBR delivery can degrade video quality result in higher overall demand on network capacity. ²PPStreaming (also referred to as P2P streaming Internet TV) is a network for live media streaming. In principle it’s similar to BitTorrent (BT) in that it provides stable and smooth broadcast of TV programs to broadband users. Unlike traditional streaming media, PPStreaming adopts P2P-streaming technology and supports full-scale visits with tens of thousands of simultaneous users. Its client software can be used in the browser or as a standalone executable.     

DVB-IPTV content download services—overview and use cases

IPTV services have been widely deployed by network operators around the world over the last years. However, real-time streaming of Linear TV and Video-on-Demand (VoD) offerings, especially in High Definition quality, still puts a high burden on the network and content servers concerning bandwidth, Quality-of-Service, processing performance and scalability if 100.000s of users have to be supported simultaneously. While multicast delivery can cope with some of these problems for Linear TV services, the unicast VoD services cannot take advantage of that and especially the request for on-demand content is expected to substantially grow in the future. With the introduction of Content Download Services (CDSs), operators have the option to provide IPTV services in innovative ways: They can provide high-quality video services to users with limited access bandwidth, offload the streaming request for blockbuster movies at peak times from the VoD servers or provided personalized advertisements for insertion into a live program event in advance to the users end device. The Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) Project has recently finalized its CDS specification within its IPTV specification efforts. DVB CDS supports push and pull delivery models with unicast, multicast and peer-to-peer distribution in order to enable various business models and use cases. In this work we introduce the specified technology and map it to example use cases and business models.     

OpenIPTV: a comprehensive SDN-based IPTV service framework

IPTV is an emerging TV content delivery service that should guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) to deliver television contents over IP for their customers. However, providing such QoS regarding service level agreements (SLA) requires frequent service monitoring and adaptive configuration mechanisms. Nowadays, Software Defined Networks (SDNs) provide capabilities to deploy and manage networks dynamically and can maintain QoS. In this paper, a novel IPTV service framework (OpenIPTV) is proposed, which utilizes SDN as an underlying technology for providing QoS for IPTV customers in a shared backbone network. OpenIPTV is implemented in a well-known OpenDayLight controller and strictly followed a modular design for the sake of efficiency. OpenIPTV comprises all service requirements such as resource monitoring, channel changing, multicast group managing and dynamic QoS multicast traffic engineering. The performance of OpenIPTV is evaluated under different scenarios and experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of QoS metrics. Furthermore, experimental results show that OpenIPTV is a feasible and practical solution to deliver IPTV services with high level of QoS over SDN.     

QoE assessment model for multimedia streaming services using QoS parameters

This paper proposes a video QoE (Quality of Experience) assessment model which can assess video quality of experience with only QoS (Quality of Service) parameters and their relative importance at network layer. Since network or service providers can forecast whether to provide multimedia services above a certain level of service quality using the proposed model, they can offer and maintain optimum network environment for multimedia service such as IPTV. Through an experiment of video quality comparison we show that our QoS/QoE correlation model is closely related with video quality degradation patterns to network environmental change.     

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

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.     

利用组播及QoS技术对IPTV网络进行优化

主要阐述了有关IPTV网络业务、组播协议、Qos协议和OPNET网络仿真软件的有关基础知识,同时阐述了在业务承载网中的IPTV网络的发展现状,研究IPTV可能出现的网络传输拥塞时的缺点,提出基于组播和QoS技术的IPTV承载网络组网方案。重点阐述了OPNET的模型层次与构建方式,并提出了OPNET网络模拟仿真的具体步骤,通过OPNET软件进行模拟仿真实验,仿真中,按照数据业务、IP语音业务、IPTV服务等三个类型,分别对网络发射数量、终端接收数据流量、网络时延值和网络抖动数值等进行测试仿真,同时对所收集的网络状态信息进行数据分析。通过仿真实验,可以发现在IPTV网络中使用Qos及组播,有效减轻业务网的流量负荷,减少传输时延,提高网络系统稳定性,从而保证了相关服务的顺利进行。     

A network algorithm for 3D/2D IPTV distribution using WiMAX and WLAN technologies

The appearance of new broadband wireless technologies jointly with the ability to offer enough quality of service to provide IPTV over them, have made possible the mobility and ubiquity of any type of device to access the IPTV network. The minimum bandwidth required in the access network to provide appropriate quality 3D/2D IPTV services jointly with the need to guarantee the Quality of Experience (QoE) to the end user, makes the need of algorithms that should be able to combine different wireless standards and technologies. In this paper, we propose a network algorithm that manages the IPTV access network and decides which type of wireless technology the customers should connect with when using multiband devices, depending on the requirements of the IPTV client device, the available networks, and some network parameters (such as the number of loss packets and packet delay), to provide the maximum QoE to the customer. The measurements taken in a real environment from several wireless networks allow us to know the performance of the proposed system when it selects each one of them. The measurements taken from a test bench demonstrate the success of our system.     

IPTV service based on a content-zapping paradigm

Internet protocol television (IPTV) generically designates a real-time distribution service for multimedia contents over an IP network, such as the Internet. There are many advantages of IPTV deployment over current digital or air broadcast TV signals: integration, the use of the switched internet protocol (IP), the possibility to build home networks that can be used to share multimedia contents over different devices, the easy implementation of video on demand services and the usage of better compression and encryption standards. In order to implement this kind of service, it is extremely useful to have a system that can efficiently classify multimedia contents and users and distribute them in a customized way. This paper proposes a novel IPTV service for the distribution of personalized multimedia contents over IP networks based on the concept of content-zapping, in contrast to traditional channel-zapping: each client system receives a multimedia streaming that is automatically composed by the system based on the user preferences and the user will only interact with the system by requesting a content change or marking a content as favorite. The paper will describe the general functionality of the service and will present the detailed architecture of the IPTV server, the key component of the service infrastructure. The server must maintain a list of media contents residing in other systems and must keep a dynamic classification of the multimedia contents that are stored in its database. This classification is built and gradually refined based on the interactions between clients and multimedia contents. Special attention is given in the paper to the classification model, describing the general ideas that are used to automatically suggest multimedia contents to a specific user (that is characterized by his complete profile). A specific content may be suggested to the user based on the knowledge of the user profile and/or based on specific and dynamic information, such as the user position, the local temperature, date and time. The availability of this information obviously depends on the specific user device that is being used. The proposed system allows any client device to connect, allowing a high level of interoperability. It is also possible to use all the device capabilities and sensors, like Global Positioning System (GPS), accelerometers, light sensors, noise sensors, etc., thus creating a context environment that helps classify each user profile. These context-awareness mechanisms applied to mobile devices with wireless network (802.11b/g/n, WiMAX, GSM, UMTS, etc.) capabilities allow a better user experience and more accurate multimedia suggestions, due to the deep knowledge about the user device, network and environment. The system also allows the users to suggest contents to other users in the same “group of friends”. Several performance tests were already conducted and the results obtained show that the proposed system is very stable and fast, even for high increases on the number of users.     

WiMAX接入技术在IPTV系统中的应用研究

在分析IPTV接入网的要求和WiMAX技术优势的基础上,提出了WiMAX应用于IPTV的系统模型,并具体分析了系统流程;针对IPTV业务下行数据量比较大的特点,提出了适合IPTV业务特点的下行链路实时调度(DLRTS)算法,该算法的主要目的在于降低实时业务的时延,从而保证IPTV的服务质量(QoS)。仿真结果表明,与常用的轮叫调度(Round R0bin)算法相比,本文算法在实时业务的时延和吞吐量两方面的性能都有明显提高,可很好地支持IPTV业务。     

一种两阶段自适应的IMS-Based IPTV应用服务器负载均衡策略

随着IPTV用户数目的增长,IPTV应用服务器的负担愈加繁重。在这种情况下,集群系统逐渐成为构建高性能和高服务质量的一种有效的应用服务器体系结构。保证应用服务器各节点的负载均衡,可以有效提高系统的吞吐量,提高IPTV服务质量。针对负载均衡问题,提出了一种基于IPTV用户行为特点的,两阶段自适应负载均衡策略,负载均衡器通过实时监控应用服务器集群内各节点的负载情况,动态修改各节点负载分配权值。算法在保持应用服务器各节点负载均衡的同时,维护用户会话的完整性,保证了服务质量QoS（Quality of Services）。仿真结果显示此算法具有较好的性能,能在保证服务质量的前提下有效地提高系统吞吐量。     

An ontology-based personalized target advertisement system on interactive TV

We design and implement a personalized target advertisement (PTA) system in IPTV using ontology-based semantic relations between IPTV program and advertisement. In the PTA system, we focus on the development of an ontology reasoning technique of improving advertisement recommendation ability and exploiting efficient information reuse. For this purpose, we first build the IPTV program ontology and viewer profiling ontology based on the IPTV program and viewers’ content consumption behavior, using OWL (Web Ontology Language) standardized by W3C. We then classify each viewer into his/her corresponding reference group using a similarity metric. After that, we define the semantic relations between advertisement and shopping products consumed by the prototype through shopping sites in IPTV. Based on these semantic relations, we infer the preferred advertisements for each viewer through our reasoning process. In the experimental section, we demonstrate a prototype of our system and the algorithm of the PTA system using various cases.     

Personalized gesture interactions for cyber-physical smart-home environments

A gesture-based interaction system for smart homes is a part of a complex cyber-physical environment, for which researchers and developers need to address major challenges in providing personalized gesture interactions. However, current research efforts have not tackled the problem of personalized gesture recognition that often involves user identification. To address this problem, we propose in this work a new event-driven service-oriented framework called gesture services for cyber-physical environments (GS-CPE) that extends the architecture of our previous work gesture profile for web services (GPWS). To provide user identification functionality, GS-CPE introduces a two-phase cascading gesture password recognition algorithm for gesture-based user identification using a two-phase cascading classifier with the hidden Markov model and the Golden Section Search, which achieves an accuracy rate of 96.2% with a small training dataset. To support personalized gesture interaction, an enhanced version of the Dynamic Time Warping algorithm with multiple gestural input sources and dynamic template adaptation support is implemented. Our experimental results demonstrate the performance of the algorithm can achieve an average accuracy rate of 98.5% in practical scenarios. Comparison results reveal that GS-CPE has faster response time and higher accuracy rate than other gesture interaction systems designed for smart-home environments.     

网络电视延时续播的设计与实现

随着互联网的迅速发展,网络电视通过互联网协议(IP)来提供包括电视节目在内的多种数字多媒体服务及其增值业务。大多数网络电视支持直播电视以及基于IP网络的视频点播服务,改变了传统电视单向广播的特点。本文介绍一种在当前网络电视系统中实现延时续播(对直播电视提供暂停、快退操作)功能的方案。     

Trust-Based Personalized Service Recommendation: A Network Perspective简

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend of Web services on the Interact. There is a great need of effective service recommendation mechanisms. Existing methods mainly focus on the properties of individual Web services （e.g., func- tional and non-functional properties） but largely ignore users＇ views on services, thus failing to provide personalized service recommendations. In this paper, we study the trust relationships between users and Web services using network modeling and analysis techniques. Based on the findings and the service network model we build, we then propose a collaborative filtering algorithm called Trust-Based Service Recommendation （TSR） to provide personalized service recommendations. This systematic approach for service network modeling and analysis can also be used for other service recommendation studies.     

面向嵌入式机顶盒终端的P2P网络电视直播系统的设计与实现

针对当前IPTV直播应用中,集中服务模式对服务器性能和网络设施要求较高、可扩展性较差的问题,提出了一种基于P2P(点对点)技术的直播系统Clear Live。与现有的P2P视频系统只针对PC终端的情况不同,该系统主要面向IPTV应用,面向嵌入式机顶盒终端,并兼容PC终端。Clear Live针对机顶盒终端的特点和IPTV应用的环境做了适当的和针对性的设计。实际系统测试结果表明,Clear Live系统能在较低的硬件配置下为大量用户提供高质量的直播服务。     

Mobile IPTV: Approaches, Challenges, Standards, and QoS Support

IPTV is defined as multimedia services, such as TV, video, audio, text, graphics, and data, delivered over IP-based networks managed to support quality of service (QoS), quality of experience, security, interactivity, and reliability. Mobile IPTV extends those services to mobile networks. The authors discuss mobile IPTV standardization's status, related approaches in the field, and technical challenges to enhancing mobile IPTV services. Given the critical role of QoS in the technology's widespread adoption, the authors also propose an efficient signaling scheme to support QoS for seamless mobile IPTV services.     

Adaptive IPTV services based on a novel IP Multimedia Subsystem

Heterogeneous communication devices are emerging and changing the way of communication. Innovative multimedia applications are now accessible through these embedded systems. The 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) provides a basic architecture framework for the Next Generation Network (NGN) supporting the convergence platform for service provisioning in heterogeneous networks. ETSI TISPAN standardization effort focuses on delivering IPTV services on such platform. Nevertheless, IPTV on IMS standardization suffers from a lack of efficient user-centric network management mechanisms as the end-user may consume IPTV service from different access networks, on different mobile devices, at anytime. User’s Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) of IPTV service may also suffer from wireless access network impairments. This paper introduces new functionalities in IPTV over IMS architecture which optimize satisfaction of the end-user and resource utilization of the operator’s networks. A context-sensitive User Profile (UP) model is used to deliver IPTV streams adapted to the user’s environment. In order to optimize the operator network usage, the impact of spatiotemporal dynamics of the video content on the deduced perceptual quality is considered. A Multimedia Content Management System (MCMS) is proposed to perform dynamic cross-layer adaptation of the IPTV stream based on PQoS measurements at the end-user side.     

Mining multilevel and location-aware service patterns in mobile web environments

In this correspondence, we address the issue of efficiently mining multilevel and location-aware associated service patterns in a mobile web environment. In terms of multilevel concept, we consider the complex problem that locations and services are of hierarchical structures. We propose a new data mining method named two-dimensional multilevel (2-DML) association rules mining, which can efficiently discover the associated service request patterns by taking into account the multilevel properties of locations and services. The discovered patterns can be effectively utilized in real applications like location-based and personalized services. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing this research issue. Some variations of the 2-DML method with different properties in terms of execution efficiency and memory efficiency were also developed. Through empirical evaluation, the proposed methods are shown to deliver good performance in terms of efficiency and scalability under various system conditions.