Fast Channel Switching Based on SVC in an IPTV Environment

An IPTV network contains characteristics of both a unicast environment and a broadcast environment. For both environments, techniques to accelerate channel switching exist. In a unicast environment a bandwidth efficient implementation to accelerate channel switching can be obtained with non scalable video coding, while for a broadcast environment the same acceleration is more optimal using scalable video coding. For a combination of both environments, as is the case for an IPTV environment, none of the solutions is optimal. In this paper, we propose a compromise between scalable and non scalable video compression to adapt to the properties of an IPTV environment. One of the proposed configurations obtains bandwidth reductions on the access network of the IPTV network between 2.4% and 4.3% with a small increase between 0.1% and 1.6% on the core network of the IPTV network.