Mitigating the IPTV Zap time in enhanced EPON systems

Zap time (channel switching time) is a critical quality of experience (QoE) metric for IPTV systems where synchronization, signaling, and propagation delays are the components under consideration. An Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is one of the main infrastructures in broadband access networks that provides high bandwidth with low propagation delay. The functionality of the EPON hardware architecture can be extended by adding programmable networking engine (PNE) and programmable sub-system (PSS) components in the optical line terminal (OLT) and optical network unit (ONU) as described in this paper to improve IPTV delivery performance for synchronization and signaling delays in terms of traffic localization. Furthermore, a new IPTV delivery mechanism is proposed to eliminate synchronization delay by buffering the current I-frames of broadcasted channels in the OLT for possible new coming requests and dropping additional streams along with the main stream. The OLTand ONUs implement a multicasting mechanism to handle part of the IPTV request as intra-domain traffic. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism significantly improves the QoE and quality of service (QoS). IPTV bandwidth usage and system throughput have improved mean packet delays and packet loss in enhanced EPON architecture.