Reducing channel zapping time in live TV broadcasting over content centric networks

Abstract

Channel zapping delay is a big challenge in delivering TV service over the Internet infrastructure. Previous research works have studied this delay, its components, and solutions to decrease it. Unfortunately, the best proposed solutions reduce the delay at the expense of increasing bandwidth usage or decreasing the received video quality. After channel switching, the Set Top Box (STB) or player application should buffer sufficient frames before starting to play the received video. However, the buffering process takes place at the playback rate and leads to a delay which is inversely related to the buffer duration. Regarding Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, this paper introduces a new channel zapping protocol that aims to remove the synchronization and buffering delays while maintaining the bandwidth utilization and also the received video quality. The general idea of the proposed solution is to exploit the in-network caching feature of the ICN to retrieve the frames from the network at the network speed. Although the analyses show that the proposed zapping protocol eliminates the delay dependency to the buffer duration, network throughput becomes the bottleneck instead. So, novel solutions have been proposed to reduce the queuing delay as the main component of network delay. These solutions include two new caching algorithms, a new cache replacement algorithm, and applying scheduling methods to the forwarding queues. Simulation results show that increasing link rates, using the proposed caching and cache replacement algorithms, and applying an appropriate scheduling method will greatly reduce the zapping delay without sacrificing the bandwidth or video quality. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.