Channel Reordering with Time-shifted Streams to Improve Channel Change Latency in IPTV Networks

In IPTV networks, channel change latency is considered as a major obstacle in achieving broadcast-level quality video delivery. Because of the bandwidth limitations observed at the client side, users typically have access to a limited number of channels. As a result, channel change requests oftentimes need to go through the network, thereby leading to significant delays. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a resource-efficient time-shifted channel reordering mechanism to minimize the channel change latency. The proposed framework exploits the differing key-frame delivery times for the adjacent sessions to dynamically arrange the switching order during the surfing periods. The simulation results show that, with the proposed framework, more than 50% improvement can be achieved in channel change latency without introducing any overhead in the network.