Dynamic Channel Reordering to Reduce Latency During Surfing Periods in IPTV Networks

In IPTV networks, channel change latency represents a major concern in achieving broadcast-level service quality. Bandwidth limitations at the user side prevents the clients from receiving all the channels at once. As a result, most of the requests have to go through the network leading to significant delays during the channel change process. In this paper, we address this latency problem in IPTV networks by proposing a novel channel reordering technique that exploits the differing key-frame delivery times for the adjacent sessions to dynamically arrange the switching order during the surfing periods. The simulation results show that, compared to static channel ordering techniques, the proposed framework can achieve more than 50% improvement in channel change latency without introducing any significant overhead in the network. The proposed dynamic reordering technique is also shown to be robust against variations observed in channel listings and/or session time-shifts.