IPTV Service Delivery over SP-Driven P2P Networks - A Framework for Linear to Non-Linear Service Distribution

P2P-based IPTV service delivery is considered as the next killer application over the Internet. P2P systems address the issues of scalability and are considered most suitable architecture for the real-time content distribution/sharing. On the other hand, P2P applications show greedy behavior in the consumption of available network bandwidth and leads to the problems of inefficient utilization of network resources and poor interactions with other applications. These problems are due to the lack of coordination among service providers (SPs) and P2P applications. Thus, in this paper, we present a SP-driven P2P framework for the IPTV service delivery to facilitate the service delivery mechanism with improved Quality of Services (QoS). The proposed mechanism is assisted by the explicit communications among SPs and P2P applications for efficient utilization of available resources. The proposed mechanism also addresses the issues related to QoS provisioning and the nonlinear service distribution.