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Television Services over the Internet Platform (IPTV-IMS) using Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Television Services on the Internet Platform (IPTV-IMS) using Real Time Flow Protocol (RTSP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
Television Services over the Internet Platform (IPTV-IMS) using Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Summary

This article evaluates the fundamental characteristics in the delivery of television and video content on demand (packet loss, delay, jitter or delay variation) on an IPTV-IMS platform, using real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) and Small Scale Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This is done with the objective of determining which of these presents a better performance. For this, multiple scenarios were studied in which both the service delivered and the structure of the network and the data flow were varied. The analysis of the results allowed to conclude that with the given conditions, the HTTP protocol presented a better performance, showing lower losses and delay and fluctuation values within the standards given for IPTV.

 

INTRODUCTION

Over time, new technologies have been developed for the delivery of multimedia content. One of them is IPTV (Television over Internet Protocol), which is perhaps one of the applications that has generated the most controversy and at the same time one of the most apparent future (Pedraza, et al., 2012). For this reason, it is essential to investigate it and to determine which protocol allows to obtain better results when presenting the contents in the terminals (televisions, smartphones, computers, etc.) of the users (Li and Yin, 2007) according to some factors. such as packet loss, end-to-end delay and delay variation (López, et al., 2012) or jitter looking for them to be as low as possible, in addition to taking into account other important metrics such as the MOS (metric to measure the quality experience) or the level of user satisfaction (NSU) that represent the quality of experience perceived by users (Hei, et al., 2007). From the quantitative results obtained for these variables, the performance evaluation will be carried out (Hyunchul, et al., 2012).

The standards selected throughout the research project were the real-time flow protocol (RTSP) and the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) since they can be used to transmit multimedia content (Sajjad and Akbar, 2013) but they work on different layers of transport, which implies different behaviors. The document is organized as follows: The first section presents a state of the art of IPTV. Next, the methodology or development of the proposal is presented, including the data obtained together with its respective analysis, ending with the most relevant conclusions of the research development.

Currently, there are different ways of delivering television and video on demand services to users such as analog broadcast television, digital terrestrial, cable, satellite, and IPTV, each of which has both advantages and weaknesses. In the case of IPTV, the greatest disadvantage of this service is due to the fact that although the offer of channels may be greater and adjusted to the interests of the user, the search for content can be very long and tedious compared to conventional analogue (Chen , et al., 2005). However this service is the one that offers greater advantages since it is not only dedicated to sending the video signal but also offers the possibility of interacting by changing the passive scenario of the viewer to an active user with the possibility of customizing the services offered through this medium (Arciniegas, et al., 2010), thus allowing them to choose what they want to see, when they want and with the possibility of interacting with that content (Soo, et al., 2011). Furthermore, the strength it has taken has allowed new services to emerge such as caller ID on television, Internet browsing while watching the program that is currently broadcasting, among others (Chunxi and Changjia, 2010).

However, this service has existed for a few years, generating great research potential (Canovas, et al., 2010). In this sense, and in order to improve the perception of what is seen in a terminal, it is important to evaluate which protocol is more efficient for sending flows when the architecture on which the IPTV service is built is supported on free platforms (Wagner and Kopilovic , 2008), such as IMS (which is a freely available multimedia over IP subsystem). For this reason, the article seeks to provide an investigative contribution in this regard, in such a way that a reliable criterion can be counted on the part of the telecommunications service providers in the selection of transport standards for this type of flows, since currently does not exist.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROPOSAL

To study, evaluate and analyze the performance of standards in the delivery of television (TV) and video on demand (VoD) services, the parameters of percentage of packet loss, delay, delay variation (jitter), and NSU will be used. against the number of users receiving content from the server.

Later the type of connection and the load on the network will be varied. Table 1 presents the levels of satisfaction established by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).


Table 1: User satisfaction levels

The IPTV platform was implemented on the Open IMS Core project (Lai, et al., 1997), using as users, free software clients called UCT IMS, installed on the machines that will receive the content. These options were selected since they are open source solutions that can be implemented on a single machine without involving additional hardware and have extensive support on the web, in addition to being widely used