Measurement of download and play and streaming IPTV traffic

Telecommunication service providers are eager for the benefits of IPTV services to penetrate into the lives of their broadband subscribers. A few multimedia delivery methods, such as multicast and P2P-style data bartering, are investigated in an attempt to reduce the network traffic at the backbone while preventing quality of experience degradation. While delivering fiber to households is still in its infancy in most parts of the world, the download and play delivery scheme has been deployed as an interim solution for video-on-demand service until fullscale multicast IPTV deployment in order to handle heterogeneous residential access networks. QoS-controlled streaming IPTV (e.g., multicast) is only available to customers with high-bandwidth broadband access. The research community has been heavily focused on how to reduce network load at the backbone and has overlooked the importance of traffic impact at the customer premises, which is very closely related to the quality of experience. This article provides a traffic impact analysis and a discussion of network-centric quality from the perspective of customers using real-world commercial traces in various user scenarios. We also present an overview of IPTV delivery schemes and user behavior models from previous measurement work. Finally, we illustrate a bandwidth demand estimation method for D&P scenarios.