Block level buffer management for video streaming services in IPTV environments

With the widespread adoption of broadband Internet services and recent advances in video technologies, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is becoming increasingly popular. IPTV provides a variety of interesting services such as VOD (Video on Demand), PVR (Personal Video Recorder), game, shopping as well as live TV broadcast. In order to support various interactive services of IPTV, more elaborate software should be equipped for video streaming services. Specifically, popularity-based interval caching is effective in improving the performance of video streaming services in IPTV environments. This paper shows that block level refinement of existing schemes can further improve the service quality and performance of video streaming in IPTV. Simulations with real world VOD traces show that the proposed scheme improves the cache hit rate and the response time significantly.