Project Summary

IPTV (InternetAdaptive Packet Recovery Schemes in IPTV Protocol Television) is one of the fastest growing markets in the telecommunication industry. It has experienced a compound annual growth of 72 percent from 2005-2009. Service providers are rapidly deploying triple play services that include data, voice and video over the same IP network. During the same period the popularity of high defi nition television (HDTV) has also risen considerably. Almost all major television stations in the United States now offer a high de finition (HD) broadcast along with the standard de finition (SD)broadcast of their programming. Customer expectations are high with regards to to the content quality and availability. Since video is delivered over the IP network, it is susceptible to the packet loss, delay and jitter.

In this research, we consider the issue packet loss.  Packet loss is one of the major hurdles in achieving high quality video in IPTV networks. This is due to the fact that the video content is highly compressed using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 compression techniques. These techniques do not recover from packet loss at the network layer. Hence, even a single packet loss can result in a considerable degradation in quality. Due to this, the industrial standards have been set to no more than one visible degradation per a two hour program i.e., one packet loss in a million. The growing use of wireless technology makes this problem even more prevalent. Wireless networks are inherently more susceptible to packet loss than wired networks.

Efficient packet recovery schemes will play a major role in providing high standards of viewing experience to the customer. In this research, we will evaluate di fferent packet recovery schemes and develop an adaptive approach to take advantage of the best features of each scheme. The three techniques are central recovery, peer-to-peer recovery and AL-FEC (Application Layer - Forward Error Correction). In this thesis we will carry out a detailed simulation analysis simulated to evaluate their performance. Finally, all of these techniques are combined with appropriate mechanisms to switch between them which in turn will be evaluated using simulation analysis.
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