A Peer-to-Peer IPTV Service Architecture for the IP Multimedia Subsystem Articles uri icon

publication date

  • July 2010

start page

  • 780

end page

  • 801

issue

  • 6-7

volume

  • 23

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1074-5351

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1099-1131

abstract

  • In this paper, we propose an IPTV service architecture for the IMS that combines a centralized control layer and a distributed, peer-to-peer-like, media layer that relies on the IMS devices or peers located in the customers' premises to act as streaming forwarding nodes. We extend the existing IMS IPTV standardization work that has already been done in 3GPP and ETSI TISPAN in order to require a minimum number of architectural changes. The objective is to obtain a system with a similar performance to the one in currently deployed systems and with the flexibility of peer-to-peer. One of the main challenges is to achieve comparable response times to user actions such as changing and tuning in to channels, as well as providing a fast recovery mechanism when streaming nodes leave. To accomplish this we introduce the idea of foster peers as peers having inactive multimedia sessions and reserved resources. These peers are on stand-by until their functionality is required and at that moment, they are able to accept downstream peers at short notice for events requiring urgent treatment like channel changing and recovery.