A design of layered P2P-based IPTV system

IPTV brings convenience for people because it merges the function of internet and traditional TV together. STB (set-top-box), as a terminal of IPTV, is very important to receive streaming data from internet and do some decoding works, finally play on the screen of TV. But more and more requirements for high-quality multimedia will cause congestion of data transmission over internet, and bring high loads on streaming server, which may result in collapse of servers, influencing the QoS of streaming. P2P (peer-to-peer) is a distributed method for resource sharing, here the resource is used in a general sense of computing power, memory, storage and bandwidth. Nowadays it's applied in many kinds of fields such as streaming, file sharing and instant messaging. For example, P2P can strongly decrease the cost of central servers in a streaming system. Streaming server is a multimedia source for disseminating streaming data to clients and then clients can transfer data in a self-organizing overlay, which will save resource of servers. In this paper, we propose a new architecture of combing IPTV and P2P, the source disseminates data to STB in a IPTV system, and STBs in internet can organize a self-organizing network, carry out P2P VoD streaming which extremely saves resource of streaming servers. It can cut down on network operator's cost and be very easy to deploy this system.