Distributing Link Stress for Internet TV Systems

In this paper, we make an in-depth investigation on the issue of distributing link stress. It is a fundamental problem in popular Internet TV systems because the service quality at the receiving side is determined by network congestion and bandwidth usage of the links. Less congestion level and balanced bandwidth usage enable IPTV systems to accommodate more subscribers and service channels, which are the most important concerns for service providers. However, prior works mostly focus on user-centric performance metrics, such as the round-trip time, downloading time, packet loss rate of individual client, but tend to ignore the network load caused by the concurrent clients. In this paper, we introduce a graph theoretical approach to distribute link stress and present a scheme that reduces and distributes link stress. Through experiments on an actual Internet testbed, PlanetLab, we show that the scheme has the remarkable advantages over existing schemes in reducing and balancing the link stress. We expect the scheme and the results can be applied to various Internet TV systems.