Effect of multicast on IPTV channel change performance

The internet is increasingly used for the transmission of multimedia content. Real-time applications such as video conferences and TV broadcasts are in the center of attention thereby. The development and the implementation of IP (Internet Protocol) multicast is the basis for a meaningful use of these services. In context of IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) service delivery, IP multicast natively supports dynamic joins, the ability to perform replication on a stream only when that stream is requested by a downstream device. When a channel or channel group is always replicated from the source to a particular node, that node is said to be configured for static joins of the channel or channel group. This paper documents the statistical analysis that was done as part of the solution to determine the recommendations for where in the network static joins should and should not be configured. Additional analysis was performed to determine when it is best to perform static versus dynamic joins of a channel group on the AR (Aggregation Router).