A comparison of transport protocols in IPTV systems

Emerging IPTV services are challenging the IP based delivery infrastructure by imposing strong scalability, robustness, and synchronization requirements on multimedia transport. The current best practice is to use the transport and systems mechanism from the broadcast world like the MPEG2 transport stream (MP2T) [1]. The rationale behind this is to rely on well established concepts from broadcasting and apply them straight to the IP-world. On the other hand, there are protocols typically used in IP-based multimedia, like RTP [2], which are already in use in mobile multimedia broadcast. It is expected that both protocols will coexist in broadcast services in future, especially in IPTV. Therefore, a comparison is of high interest to understand more deeply which protocol is more appropriate in different situations, and what challenges are protocol gateways faced with.