A Validated Analytical Model for Availability Prediction of IPTV Services in VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), besides the original applications typically related to traffic safety, we nowadays can observe an increasing trend toward infotainment applications, such as IPTV services. Quality of experience (QoE), as observed by the end users of IPTV, is highly important to guarantee adequate user acceptance for the service. In IPTV, QoE is mainly determined by the availability of TV channels for the users. This paper presents an efficient and rather generally applicable analytical model that allows one to predict the blocking probability of TV channels, both for channel-switching-induced, as well as for handover-induced blocking events. We present the successful validation of the model by means of simulation, and we introduce a new measure for QoE. Numerous case studies illustrate how the analytical model and our new QoE measure can be applied successfully for the dimensioning of IPTV systems, taking into account the QoE requirements of the IPTV service users in strongly diverse traffic scenarios.