Content-aware replica placement strategy for IPTV services over peer-service area architecture

Abstract

Due to the enormous improvement in networking and multimedia, IPTV has become recently a popular means to distribute high quality TV services over IP networks. Accordingly, Telecommunication companies started the competition to provide IPTV services to increase their customer base and profit. The key concern of service providers in this hectic competition is to provide high quality service with lower cost. However, the contents' popularity and the users' preferences are fluctuated rapidly, which leads to resources waste and load imbalance. Thus, the contents' status should be considered during the content replication to save resources and reduce service cost. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work investigate the impact of contents' status on building Replica Placement Strategy. Therefore, this paper studies the impact of contents' status on replica placement strategy over the peer-service area architecture. Two optimization models are proposed Cost Effective Model (CE), which replicates the contents partially without considering contents' status and Cost Effective with Load Balance model (CELB), which considers the contents' status. Both models have been solved using Hybrid Genetic Algorithm. The experimental results show that CELB model outperforms the other models in terms of Storage Saving Ratio (SSR), load distribution, and allocation cost.