Soft handover mechanism based on RTP parallel transmission for mobile IPTV services

Mobile Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) provides users with multimedia content through wireless access technologies whenever they want and wherever they are. However, vertical handover in heterogeneous networks results in long interruption time and large packet loss rate, which poses a challenge for seamless mobile IPTV service. The existing solutions that make use of the heterogeneous access networks to transmit multimedia content have two drawbacks: high bandwidth consumption of the wireless networks and lots of packets loss when a user resides in the overlapped area of the boundary. To solve these issues, we propose a new soft handover mechanism, based on the IPTV server and the consumer electronic devices. The proposed Parallel Soft Handover (PSH) divides the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packets according to the packet loss rates, and exploits different networks efficiently by using parallel transmission. Moreover, the selective retransmission for RTP packets is introduced to reduce the packet loss. Simulation results demonstrate that the PSH can reduce the packet loss rate, as well as obtain a more efficient use of the wireless bandwidth.