Delivering IPTV service over a virtual network: A study on virtual network topology

Abstract

In this study, we design an applicable model enabling internet protocol television (IPTV) service providers to use a virtual network (VN) for IPTV service delivery. The model addresses the guaranteed service delivery, cost effectiveness, flexible control, and scalable network infrastructure limitations of backbone or IP overlay-based content networks. There are two major challenges involved in this research: i) The design of an efficient, cost effective, and reliable virtual network topology (VNT) for IPTV service delivery and the handling of a VN allocation failure by infrastructure providers (InPs) and ii) the proper approach to reduce the cost of VNT recontruction and reallocation caused by VNT allocation failure. Therefore, in this study, we design a more reliable virtual network topology for solving a single virtual node, virtual link, or video server failure. We develop a novel optimization objective and an efficient VN construction algorithm for building the proposed topology. In addition, we address the VN allocation failure problem by proposing VNT decomposition and reconstruction algorithms. Various simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed VNT, as well as that of the associated construction, decomposition, and reconstruction algorithms in terms of reliability and efficiency. The simulation results are compared with the findings of existing works, and an improvement in performance is observed.