Effective resource utilization routing algorithm for IPTV

To guarantee the required quality of service and quality of experience in Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), the server must have the required capacity and resources to serve all the clients' requests. One of the most important resources is the bandwidth. The flexibility of IPTV services which provide users to stream multimedia contents at anytime and anywhere they want makes the demand for video-on-demand (VoD) service higher. To serve the VoD requests, the server uses unicast scheme which consumes more bandwidth and resources. However, the server bandwidth capacity is limited as such the numerous requests from the clients may exhaust all the available bandwidth depending on the number of requests at a given time, which leads to the poor quality of services. In this study we proposed a new algorithm called Effective Resource Utilization Routing Algorithm (ERURA) for IPTV that takes advantage of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) characteristics to reduce the total dependency on the server by the mobile nodes. Simulations were conducted using OPNET modeler. The simulation results show that the algorithm reduces the bandwidth consumption and overload at the server node.