New Design of a Fiber Channel-Embedded Set-Top Box for IPTV Networks

Abstract

The Internet protocol television (IPTV) service enables people to enjoy various Internet-based services via conventional TV watching. In the IPTV system, a set-top box (STB) is the key since it works as a terminal device that can relay real-time multimedia content from the Internet. However, the current IPTV STB functions as an attached device in a local area network although the actual IPTV network is usually served by an optical fiber-based network such as fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). Therefore, we introduce a novel fiber channel (FC)-embedded IPTV STB to fully use the sufficient optical fiber-based network bandwidth such as 1 Gbps. To verify the IPTV network capabilities by impact of the FC-embedded STB, we evaluate the performance of the FC-embedded STB-attached IPTV network architecture via extensible simulations in terms of an average startup-delay, an average reject ratio, and the number of concurrent users. Surprisingly, the suggested IPTV system demonstrates superior average startup-delay (less than 15 msec), an acceptable average reject-ratio less than 3%, and an almost linear increasing number of concurrent users, which reveals that the FC-embedded STB significantly affects the entire FC-AL-based IPTV network performance by efficiently facilitating the broadband optical fiber bandwidth.