TBM: A High-Effective Monitoring Algorithm to the Quality of IPTV Transmission

IPTV transfers network TV signals based on IP protocol. Monitoring the IPTV data transmission quality is of great importance to the extensive deployment and persistent improvement of IPTV services. RFC4445 proposes the metric of MDI (Media Delivery Index) in which DF (Delay Factor)and MLR (Media Loss Rate) are utilized to do quantitative evaluation to the transmission quality of IP video. However, it is quite difficult and complicated to compute an accurate value of DF in the process of evaluation. To this end, we present the TBM (Token Bucket Monitoring) algorithm. Compared with DF method, the TBM algorithm can not only be applied to large-scale IPTV distribution scenario but also be implemented easily. Thus, TBM can be widely used in the resource-limited and low-cost end system like STB. Furthermore, experimental results show the efficacy of TBM algorithm to monitor the transmission quality of IPTV streaming media.