IPTV Systems, Standards and Architectures: Part II - IPTV Services over IMS: Architecture and Standardization

This article presents an architecture to support IPTV services in an IMS-based NGN. The architecture extends the current IMS specification with the required functionality to meet additional requirements of IPTV services. The proposed architecture can be deployed by an IPTV provider over heterogeneous access networks (mobile, wireless, and fixed) as a part of standardized NGN solutions. After presenting an overview of the IPTV standardization activities in DVB, ITU-T, ETSI, ATIS, 3GPP, and OMA, this article focuses on the ETSI TISPAN IPTV standardization. IMS-based IPTV architectural functions and possible IPTV evolutionary steps are discussed, and then the article presents an implementation example.