Quality-assured provisioning of IPTV services in Ethernet-based broadband networks

Over the last decade, advances in Internet technology brought about the proliferation of Internet-based multimedia applications, particularly known as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services. In the large-scale, heterogeneous, multi-vendor, and increasingly complex and multi-functional IPTV networks, the quality assured provisioning is one of the key challenges to service providers. To support IPTV services across such a complicated IPTV network, we first address some selected significant provisioning issues such as virtual LAN (VLAN) based service binding, the integration of robust quality of service (QoS) mechanisms, and multicast flow management. Moreover, we leverage the Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) to build a large-scale, cost-effective, and reliable network. Finally, we present the design of the integrated and automated quality-assured provisioning systems for the largest commercial IPTV network in Taiwan. The integrated systems support the diversity of services and across all of the enabling IPTV network devices. The proposed systems speed up the end-to-end quality assured service delivery, reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX), and result in higher customer satisfaction.