Available bandwidth estimation for high quality television content

High quality television content such as IPTV is delivered at a high cost for network operators. Most of the time, the network capacity (maximum bandwidth) is under-utilized and therefore there is room for additional content to be placed by an IPTV content generator in the communication channel. In order to use the spare capacity, it is necessary to use mechanisms to estimate the bandwidth availability in such way that the content generator is able to react when there is a change in the network. In this paper it is shown that an available bandwidth estimator can be used to provide estimates to an IPTV content generator so that new content can be delivered or the quality of service and experience can be improved. A controlled network environment is used to transmit five sequences of an IPTV video and measure the real utilization of the network and compare it with the estimated by a tool called Traceband. Results show that the granularity of the estimation is good for the content generator to react to variations in the network utilization.