An Efficient IPTV Distribution Technique under NAT Environment

IPTV is an emerging Internet application that pumps heavy video traffic to both access networks and ISP backbones. Due to the lack of commercial deployment of IP multicast, huge volume of streaming traffic may overload the servers. Hence, P2P IPTV distribution becomes popular and advances quickly. P2P IPTV uses two approaches: tree-push and mesh-pull. The latter has experienced a number of successful deployments with large online population. In this work, we propose a novel IPTV distribution technique that allows the streaming server to send a single copy instead of multiple copies for distributing video content to a group of recipients under the NAT environment, which is very common in both residential and business local area networks. Experiment shows that our proposed technique not only greatly saves the bandwidth but also improves quality of service of IPTV significantly.