IPTV Transcoding to Avoid Network Congestion

IP Television (IPTV) is a new service that is growing up very quick in recent years. Its implementation is performed as a Triple-Play service, being the integration of voice, high-speed data and television. Moreover, the network traffic has been increased due to the use of VoIP, video or P2P. It is also creating congestion problems to the network provider and has high impact on the quality of IPTV. For this reason, it is necessary to provide tools in order to reduce the congestion and provide the maximum Quality of Experience to the customers. In this paper we analyze the bandwidth used by a movie and we propose a video transcoder as a tool to control the congestion in IPTV networks. The results obtained are similar to the traffic shaping. The measurements obtained in our test bench shows that a video transcoder can be used to guarantee a certain QoE, in the presence of congestion.