Switch Delay Analysis of a Multi-Channel Delivery Method for IPTV

IPTV technology is still faced with such concerns in its quality of service as channel switch delay. One way among many that are devised to reduce this delay is multi-channel synchronous delivery. However, the bandwidth efficiency of this method is low. We propose a finite duration method in this paper and build up mathematical models to describe user behaviors like channel surfing to evaluate the performance of channel switch delay. We find through analysis and simulation that our method is well balanced in performance and cost. In a typical situation, the delay can be reduced to less than 30%.