Performance Evaluation of IPTV Over Wireless Home Networks

The emergence of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has brought potentials to revolutionize personal entertainment. Streaming TV content over the highly pervasive wireless networks allows easy access to personalized entertainment. Focusing on wireless home entertainment which is one of the main driving forces of IPTV development, we develop a Markovian framework that investigates several important issues related to network capacity and streaming quality in an IEEE 802.11e enabled wireless home network. The Markovian framework captures not only the IEEE 802.11e MAC protocol performance, but also the statistical characteristics of IPTV media streams. The inclusion of these two key descriptions allows our model to be practically used in wireless home network planning and design. To deal with the complexity in the model, we apply the efficient Matrix Geometric approach to obtain numerical results. We further perform simulations with real IPTV traffic to not only validate our analytical results, but also obtain further insight to the performance.