Abstract
The convergence of telecommunication, cable TV, and broadcast networks towards the Internet technology will enable the provision of emerging multimedia services as well as the integration of rich communication capabilities with TV services. However, enabling efficient delivery of interactive personalized multimedia services with mobility support requires an advanced overlay control framework. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offers the basic functions to manage multimedia sessions over different access networks. This paper outlines current standardization activities that address the provisioning of TV services over IP networks—known as IPTV—and proposes a novel end-to-end overall architecture based on IMS that enables the delivery of converged multimedia services. Furthermore, the paper presents the FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab as a reference implementation of this framework which covers a widespread spectrum of converged interactive scenarios. The final section gives an impression of the system performance by providing the end-to-end signaling delay of a session setup for live TV service delivered over unicast transmission mode.
Highlights
Broad end-user demand and corresponding investments in the deployment of mobile and fixed broadband infrastructures in the late 90s of the last century paved the way for the convergence of telecommunication, cable TV (CATV) and broadcast networks towards the Internet technology, currently driving the notion of all-IP core networks
BT Vision [1] from British Telecom in the UK and T-Home Entertain [2] from Deutsche Telekom in Germany are only two examples of currently deployed IPTV service platforms. These solutions are built on top of very high speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) access networks [3] that offer bandwidths up to tens of Mbps to ensure a good user experience while watching TV broadcasts by using best effort delivery without quality of service (QoS) on top of partially managed network infrastructures. (The available bandwidth depends on the distance from the user facilities to the telephone exchange.) This procedure to assure QoS by offering more bandwidth than the maximum required for a certain application is called over-provisioning
Based on the design principles of the logical architecture discussed in the previous section, we would like to present a proof of concept implementation, which is integrated in the FOKUS Media Interoperability Lab (MIL) [24] that has been validated through several demo applications
Summary
Broad end-user demand and corresponding investments in the deployment of mobile and fixed broadband infrastructures in the late 90s of the last century paved the way for the convergence of telecommunication, cable TV (CATV) and broadcast networks towards the Internet technology, currently driving the notion of all-IP core networks. BT Vision [1] from British Telecom in the UK and T-Home Entertain [2] from Deutsche Telekom in Germany are only two examples of currently deployed IPTV service platforms These solutions are built on top of very high speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) access networks [3] that offer bandwidths up to tens of Mbps to ensure a good user experience while watching TV broadcasts by using best effort delivery without quality of service (QoS) on top of partially managed network infrastructures. The delivery of integrated multimedia services over IP-based heterogeneous access networks requires a set of control functions such as identity and session management, authentication, authorization, accounting, resource allocation, policy enforcement, QoS, and so forth Within this context, the long-term all-IP nature of NGN is being impacted by the so-called IMS [5], which has been considered as an overlay control subsystem on top of mobile, fixed and cable access networks that provides these supporting functions.
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