Improving QoE in multicast IPTV systems: Channel zapping times

The usage of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) deployments in the consumer electronics market is growing very popular in recent years. In IPTV multicast systems, quality of experience is a very critical factor for user satisfaction. Existing and future IPTV systems will offer a large number of channels to users. The most important factors that affect the quality of experience in IPTV systems are channel zapping times. Generally, the channel zapping time depends on several parameters like IGMP command process time, network delay time, IPTV consumer device processing delay time, jitter buffer delay time, MPEG decoder time and conditional access/digital rights management (CA/DRM) delay time. In this paper, we presented an analysis of channel zapping time in IPTV systems and we proposed a new approach based on channel-based peer selection, called CBPS where the peer partner to construct peer-to-peer communication is discovered and unicast stream for joined channel will be get from peer partner during zapping process. By this way, black screen will not be displayed to user during zapping process until the channel stream coming from server is available. The simulation results in OPNET Modeler have been provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.