On tightly managing end-to-end QoS and security for IPTV service delivery

摘要

Today, the IPTV technology is emerging as a new concept for delivering and accessing audiovisual services over IP networks. To allow the transmission of IPTV services on wired and wireless networks, different issues should be overcome: scalability, QoS provisioning, security guaranty, and terminals heterogeneity. In this regards, there is a relation between QoS and security as both need to be carefully and tightly managed in a complete framework and not tackled separately. In this paper, we show how QoS and security are tightly managed in a complete end-to-end architecture for providing IPTV services while addressing the majority of the above issues (scalability, QoS, security, and heterogeneity). In particular, we propose an IPTV architecture that deals with end-to-end QoS and security management at two segments: the core network and the access network. The core network is composed of independent domains where each of them is managed by a local domain manager having service level negotiation capabilities. The access network is considered as WLAN (802.11) which connects heterogeneous mobile terminals. The proposed IPTV architecture includes two main entities: the Content Server which provides the TV stream in the core network and the Adaptation Gateway that assures the TV stream adaptation in wireless network according to terminal capabilities and user profile.