Study of Reliable Multicast for IPTV Service

Abstract: Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is a service on the Internet where digital TV signal data is delivered to the participants using the Internet Protocol (IP). IPTV promises to provide many TV channels with lower price for operators, lower price for consumers and it is also distributed more efficiently than using the nowadays prevalent coaxial cable distribution. As it is assumed that broadband connection of households will grow at a brisk pace, IPTV will play more and more important role in the incoming years in our lives. The plenty of TV channels requires large bandwidth for high clear TV programs in IPTV service which is a contradictory issue to the limitation of user access line bandwidth and aggregation network bandwidth. Multicast as a mature one-to-many packet data delivery technology, the use of multicast for IPTV service is considered necessary to resolve such contradiction. But which multicast or what level multicast will be best suited for this emerging technology is still a burning question. In this thesis we identify the appropriate multicast solution for IPTV. To accomplish our goal, we have done literature survey in gathering information to analyse different AL multicast protocol and IP multicast protocols. We have tried to find out different problems related to this protocol to deployment. Finally we have identified the best suited solution to carry multicast traffic for IPTV service.