Fast Channel Zapping with Destination-Oriented Multicast for IP Video Delivery

Channel zapping time is a critical quality of experience (QoE) metric for IP-based video delivery systems such as IPTV. An interesting zapping acceleration scheme based on time-shifted subchannels (TSS) was recently proposed, which can ensure a zapping delay bound as well as maintain the picture quality during zapping. However, the behaviors of the TSS-based scheme have not been fully studied yet. Furthermore, the existing TSS-based implementation adopts the traditional IP multicast, which is not scalable for a large-scale distributed system. Corresponding to such issues, this paper makes contributions in two aspects. First, we resort to theoretical analysis to understand the fundamental properties of the TSS-based service model. We show that there exists an optimal subchannel data rate which minimizes the redundant traffic transmitted over subchannels. Moreover, we reveal a start-up effect, where the existing operation pattern in the TSS-based model could violate the zapping delay bound. With a solution proposed to resolve the start-up effect, we rigorously prove that a zapping delay bound equal to the subchannel time shift is guaranteed by the updated TSS-based model. Second, we propose a destination-oriented-multicast (DOM) assisted zapping acceleration (DAZA) scheme for a scalable TSS-based implementation, where a subscriber can seamlessly migrate from a subchannel to the main channel after zapping without any control message exchange over the network. Moreover, the subchannel selection in DAZA is independent of the zapping request signaling delay, resulting in improved robustness and reduced messaging overhead in a distributed environment. We implement DAZA in ns-2 and multicast an MPEG-4 video stream over a practical network topology. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the validity of our analysis and DAZA scheme.