CAM03-4: Management of Time-Shifted IPTV Services through Transparent Proxy Deployment

A recent important evolution in broadband access network design is the deployment of IP aware access network elements, which allow to introduce access network services beyond basic triple-play. The focus of this paper is on the management of time-shifted television (tsTV), an IPTV service which allows for watching the broadcast content at real-time or with a (small) time shift. An architecture for a large-scale tsTV service deployment is presented, using co-operating transparent diskless proxy caches in broadband access networks, with an implementation based on the IETF's real-time streaming protocol (RTSP). Caching algorithms have been designed to take into account content popularity and distance metrics. The algorithms make use of the sliding window concept and calculate the optimal trade-off between bandwidth usage efficiency and storage cost. A prototype implementation of a transparent tsTV proxy is presented and evaluated through performance measurements.