P2P-based mobile IPTV: Challenges and opportunities

In the last few years, we have witnessed a rapid growth of multimedia content delivery across the networks. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks are considered as one of the most suitable targeted infrastructure for supporting real time streaming and has played vital role in this growth. IPTV service is considered as the emerging application that has a great potential to incur new revenues for contents and service providers. This service gives more choice to the end users to consume TV programs in their personalized way and beyond any geographical constraints. The exploitation of P2P- based IPTV services has turned the dream of Universal Media Access (UMA) in reality. However, the efficient deployment of P2P-based IPTV with better Quality of Service (QoS) needs to address certain challenges. However, for the provision of better QoS IPTV service, we need to cope with the dynamic characteristics of P2P framework that can deter drastically the performance of such applications. In this paper, we emphasize some challenges, opportunities, and open issues regarding IPTV service over mobile terminals operating over P2P based networks.