An Active Channel Changing Delay method to improve IPTV channel availability

IPTV clients´ sequential zapping behavior can introduce extra traffic load in underlying transmission networks, which may greatly degrade client Quality of Experience (QoE). It is therefore highly desirable to enhance IPTV channel availability (one of the most important QoE metrics) in IPTV systems with clients zapping channels sequentially. To this end, this paper proposes an Active Channel Changing Delay (ACCD) admission control method in combination with an n-layered (one base layer and n-1 enhancement layers) Scalable Video Coding (SVC) profile to alleviate the aforementioned impact caused by client sequential zapping. Comprehensive simulation experiments are carried out and show that the proposed ACCD method are capable of significantly improving channel availability and hence can enhance client QoE in bandwidth restricted IPTV delivery networks, with only slightly increasing the average service delay of channel enhancement layers.