A novel prebuffering scheme for IPTV service

The Internet Protocol TeleVision (IPTV) network utilizes the broadband IP network to provide users the TV service. Due to the limited bandwidth of the IP network, IPTV does not broadcast the content of all channels to its users. The channel zapping time (i.e., the delay between the time when the user switches to a new TV channel and the time when the content of the new TV channel is received by the user) and content miss (i.e., the content of the new TV channel arrives after the user switches to another TV channel so that the user did not watch the content of the new TV channel) significantly affect the QoS of IPTV service. This paper proposes Dynamic Prebuffering Scheme (DPS) that dynamically prebuffers the content of TV channels in the Home Gateways (HGs) based on the user’s behavior to reduce the channel zapping time and the content miss probability. A prebuffer timer is implemented in DPS to reduce the bandwidth consumption. Both the analytic model and simulation experiments are developed to investigate the performance of DPS. The simulation results show that the performance enhancements are bounded by the setup of the number of prebuffering channels and the prebuffer timer. Based on the performance study, the IPTV operators can properly set the number of prebuffered channels and the prebuffer timer to obtain good performance. Our study indicates that DPS can significantly reduce the channel zapping time and the content miss probability by slightly increasing bandwidth consumption.