An Ethernet Access Architecture for Highly Available IPTV

We propose a practical Ethernet access architecture to support high availability and service continuity for IPTV. To reduce the per-line cost, our approach is interconnecting switches, most of which are low-cost, in a hierarchical fashion to provide broadband and cost-effective IPTV multicasting. The remaining key issue is to endow the IPTV services with high availability. To this end, we base on the redundant pair method and propose an architecture which achieves short failover process to seamlessly continue the IPTV services. In realization, our effort is restricted in extending the IGMP proxy running on the switch controller, and we describe our realization by presenting the basic design principle. To demonstrate its viability, we test our proposed architecture on ACTA which is a commercially available platform. Experiment results show that in general the failover process can be carried out within 50 ms.