Improving quality of experience in P2P IPTV

Abstract

Nowadays many IPTV services are deployed based on P2P structure for the sake of saving the cost of server equipment and bandwidth requirement. Since peers may join and leave the P2P system arbitrarily, it may cause the service quality unstable. In this paper, we compare IP addresses to find partner peers in proximity, and use specific packet pairs to probe partner peers that have larger bandwidth, so as to reduce the switching delay thru pushing the video chunks proactively. We also use two buffers that store data of both current and newly selected channel to improve the stability of media playback. We use OMNET++ simulator to evaluate our proposed schemes, the numerical results show that our schemes significantly reduce the channel switching delay and improve the smoothness of video playback.