Multi-Room IPTV Delivery through Pseudo-Broadcast over IEEE 802.11 Links

The IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) is a time-tested technology, but it is still evolving towards even higher speeds and richer features. For multi-room IPTV delivery, where multiple IPTVs are fed from a main set-top box (STB), the IEEE 802.11 WLAN is an attractive choice for wirelessly connecting the STB and the IPTVs. In this paper, however, we first show that both the standard 802.11 unicast and broadcast/multicast delivery mechanisms have efficiency and reliability issues when they are applied to the multi-room IPTV delivery. In order to resolve the issues, we propose to use so called the pseudo-broadcast, where a unicast transmission is promiscuously received by multiple receivers. By dynamically changing the unicast destination based on the 802.11k measurement, the scheme also minimizes losses experienced by the promiscuous receivers. The scheme can be implemented without any change in the 802.11 standard, and provides a cost-effective solution to high-reliability and high-efficiency multi-room IPTV delivery.