Development of an effective Zapping delay framework for Internet Protocol Television over a converged network

Abstract

Internet Protocol Television is a system that has revolutionized the media and telecommunication industries. It provides the platform for transmitting digitised television services across the Internet Protocol infrastructure. Internet Protocol Television took advantage of the Internet service convergence by providing seamless interactivity, time shifting, video on demand and pay per view to subscribers. However, zapping delay is a critical problem that deters the switching intention of terrestrial subscribers and the widespread of Internet Protocol Television services. Subscribers often experience this zapping delay problem in Internet Protocol Television when switching channels, which makes subscribers, wait for several seconds before the desired channel is found and made available. The zapping delay problem is intrinsically caused by video stream end-to-end delay, buffering delay, network jitter and traffic load. In the last few decades, a lot of frameworks, for instance, those based on multiple channels, have been proposed to reduce zapping delay in Internet Protocol Television. Such frameworks are implemented at the subscriber level, network level or video level. However, high bandwidth is still required to make the existing frameworks work effectively, which is an intrinsic limitation because not all subscribers can afford the cost of high bandwidth. This research develops a unified framework that takes the advantages provided at the subscriber level and network level to solve the zapping delay problem in Internet Protocol Television. It is possible to reduce zapping delay in Internet Protocol Television using an effective framework to aid faster channel switching and increase the quality of experience. The framework being proposed in this research is faster than a regular stream and it reduces the zapping delay to the bare minimum. The framework has been validated at both subscriber and network levels, which indicates that as traffic load increases at a set bandwidth within the converged network, packet end to end delay and network jitter should be reduced in order to eliminate zapping delay. Furthermore, the encoded and decoded video sequence available to the subscriber is evaluated using popular quantitative metrics and mean opinion score to determine subscriber perceptions of video quality through the salient object that will interest the subscriber in the video sequence displayed in order to aid a high satisfaction level video quality of experience. A large-scale implementation of the proposed framework by a telecommunication firm promises to generate revenue for the firm. In addition, the implementation and practical deployment of the proposed framework would also benefit subscribers to enjoy unlimited Internet Protocol Television services at reduced cost.