Grouped frequency interleaved ordering with pre-fetching for efficient channel navigation in internet protocol television

Abstract

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is becoming one of the major internet applications due to its variety of contents and services. However, the increased number of channels makes very difficult to find one’s desired contents of the channel, because the biggest challenge in IPTV is the channel zapping delay which occurs during channel switching. In this paper, a Grouped Frequency Interleaved Ordering (GFIO) with Pre-Fetching (PF) has been proposed to reduce the channel zapping delay in an IPTV. The channel zapping delay is reduced by minimizing the channel seek distance and seek time of the IPTV channels. Thereby, minimizing the channel seek distance by grouping similar category of channels and reordering that based on popularity ranking. The channel seek time is reduced by pre-fetching the contents of channels as adjacent to the main channel (currently watching channel). Additionally, main channel only coded as using both base and enhancement layer while all other PF channels are coded only with the base layer in the proposed scheme rather than all channels coded with both layers. Trace- driven simulations with various experimental conditions show that the proposed scheme performs better than the existing schemes. When the number of IPTV channels is 150, the average seek distance is reduced to 57.14% and the average seek time is reduced to 77.78% by combining GFIO with the adjacent channel PF scheme. The proposed scheme also saving 24.75 % of the bit rate, reduces 26.92 % of the encoding time and 27.59 % of decoding time.