IPTV Bandwidth Demands in Metropolitan Area Networks

In this paper, we analyze the bandwidth requirements in Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) for providing Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services. We find that the application with the potential to generate high bandwidth in the MAN is Video on Demand (VoD). However, the amount of bandwidth in the MAN depends on the location of the video servers and cached video content. Therefore, we develop a model of the IPTV network to determine the optimum location of the cached video content. From this model, we find the dependence of the MAN traffic on the fraction of users simultaneously requesting VoD streams. The results show that a significant fraction of future MAN traffic, up to 90%, may be due to these on-demand video services.