Channel reordering and prefetching schemes for efficient IPTV channel navigation

As Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has become one of the major Internet applications, IPTV users increase rapidly and hundreds of channels emerge to satisfy users' demands. However, the increased number of channels makes users difficult to find their desired channels. Along with this problem, the channel zapping time of IPTV incurs serious user-perceived delay. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents hybrid schemes that combine channel prefetching and reordering schemes. Specifically, adjacency and popularity based prefetching schemes are combined with popular channel reordering schemes and their performances are simulated under various conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes reduce the channel seek time by up to 44.7% when up-down channel selection interfaces are used.