Simulation of IPTV caching strategies

IPTV, where television is distributed over the Internet Protocol in a single operator network, has become popular and widespread. Many telecom and broadband companies have become TV providers and distribute TV channels using multicast over their backbone networks. IPTV also means an evolution to time-shifted television where viewers now often can choose to watch the programs at any time. However, distributing individual TV streams to each viewer requires a lot of bandwidth and is a big challenge for TV operators. In this paper we present an empirical IPTV workload model, simulate IPTV distribution with time-shift, and show that local caching can limit the bandwidth requirements significantly.