PaCRAm: Path Aware Content Replication Approach with Multicast for IPTV Networks

The recent years have seen an explosive upsurge in the popularity of IPTV networks and the IPTV user base. The increased user base poses new challenges to IPTV provider in providing the IPTV services with the expected QoE to the users due to the increase in traffic and heterogeneity in networks. The VoD, being the most prominent and most lucrative of the triple play components, require efficient managing in order for the IPTV provider to meet the expectations of the users, i.e. efficient management of contents. In this paper, we propose PaCRA_m by adding a new multicast approach SMoD which combines unicast and multicast, to our earlier proposed content replication strategy PaCRA. SMoD provides satisfactory levels of QoE by eliminating the batching delay which is present in the traditional multicast approaches by exploiting the segmentation of videos. We show that the application of SMoD significantly improves the performance of PaCRA in terms of resource utilization, rejection rate and number of content replications. We further recommend a pre-population strategy for video segments to improve the performance of SMoD by taking into account the segment numbers for future work.