Performances of Random IPTV Channel Change with Finite Duration Multi-Channel Delivery

Multi-channel delivery is one competitive solution to reduce channel change time in IPTV. We presented the performance analysis on finite duration multi-channel delivery method in our previous work, when channel changes are sequential and adjacent. In this paper, we develop mathematical models to evaluate the performance of this method when channel change happens randomly. This in fact generalizes the previous model. We find that, in typical setup, a delivery duration of 20 seconds is enough to reduce the channel change time by 47.5%, yet the peak bandwidth increase on carrier's uplink is 66.7%. This indicates that the finite duration multi-channel delivery method can improve viewers' experience effectively when channel changes are random.