Improving Transmission Efficiency in H.264 Based IPTV Systems

Author

Jennehag, Ulf ; Zhang, Tingting ; Pettersson, Stefan

Author_Institution

Dept. of Inf. Technol. & Media, Mid Sweden Univ., Sundsvall

Volume

53

Issue

1

fYear

2007

fDate

3/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

69

Lastpage

78

Abstract

In this paper, a novel proposal regarding the transmission of the next generation of live-TV content in an IPTV environment is presented. Today live-TV IP transmission systems utilizes a Group Of Pictures (GOP) structure in order to provide stream synchronization points for the clients. Synchronization points are used when a TV-channel switch occurs. The number of channel switches made by TV audiences have been shown to be rather rare. It is therefore redundant to send synchronization events in a GOP manner. Our proposal, Synchronization Frames for Channel Switching (SFCS), only requests synchronization points when required. Due to channel popularity distributions and the number of connected users, the total number of synchronization requests for a popular channel can increase to a level that makes SFCS less effective than GOP. Therefore, we introduce an SFCS-GOP hybrid. A complete network traffic analysis model, verified by a simple simulation environment, is also presented and the results show that the SFCS-GOP hybrid significantly increases the bandwidth utilization compared to a traditional GOP system

Keywords

IP networks; interactive television; interactive video; packet switching; synchronisation; telecommunication traffic; video coding; GOP; H.264 based IPTV systems; SFCS; group of pictures structure; live-TV IP transmission systems; network traffic analysis; synchronization frames-for-channel switching; IPTV; Proposals; Streaming media; Switches; TV; Telecommunication traffic; Traffic control; Transport protocols; Video coding; Video on demand; Interactive TV; multicast channels; video coding;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Broadcasting, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9316

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TBC.2006.887167

Filename

4114797