Analysis of QoE key factors in IPTV systems: Channel switching

The usage of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) deployments in the consumer electronics market is growing very popularly in recent years. In IPTV systems, Quality of Experience (QoE) is very critical factor for end-user satisfaction. Existing and future IPTV systems will offer a large number of channels to users. The most important factors that affects to QoE in IPTV systems are channel zapping and channel selection problems. Generally, the channel zapping time depends on several parameters like Internet Group Membership Protocol (IGMP) command processing time, network delay time, IPTV consumer device processing delay time, jitter buffer delay time, MPEG decoder time and Conditional Access/Digital Rights Management (CA/DRM) delay time. In this paper, we present an analysis of channel change delay in IPTV systems and we propose a new approach based on channel-based peer selection, called CBPS where the most suitable peer to construct peer-to-peer (P2P) communication will be discovered from a look-up table in the central server.