IPTV channel switching delay reduction through predicting subscribers’ behaviors and preferences

This article aims at proposing a novel approach based on subscribers’ behaviors and preferences in order to reduce channel switching delay in Internet protocol television (IPTV) over WiMAX networks. In the proposed scheme, first an algorithm is proposed for extracting users’ preferences according to their behaviors so that the list of favorite channels is established for each user, where each channel is assigned a score. Having the channels clustered by the IPTV service providers, we propose two algorithms namely PGCP and P-PGCP based on which the favorite channels whose scores exceed a predefined threshold are pre-fetched in a low quality format. This procedure referred to as background channel transmission is the key idea in reducing channel switching latency. In PGCP, the dedicated bandwidth of pre-fetched channels is given to the highest score channels available at the top of each user’s preference list. However in the p-PGCP, the popularity of the channels among all users is also taken into account in such a way that a channel which is popular among more users is assigned a higher priority of pre-fetching. Simulation results demonstrate the fact that the proposed two algorithms sufficiently take advantage of users’ behavior patterns and is capable of reducing the channel switching time compared with existing approaches.