IPTV Capacity Analysis using DCCP over IEEE 802.11n

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has gained an enormous growth rate by revolutionizing personal entertainment. High data rates with increased coverage radius of IEEE 802.11n Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) motivate the concept of wireless IPTV. Streaming of Television contents over highly pervasive wireless environment with satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) is a challenging task. Focusing on wireless IPTV, our work deals with the capacity evaluation of IPTV users over IEEE 802.11n. We first present an upper capacity limit for supporting maximum number of users over IEEE 802.11n. We then propose that 4-times packet size is the optimal frame aggregation size for IPTV which maximizes users capacity and QoS. Finally, we suggest the use of Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) at transport layer for IPTV. We show that DCCP capacity for IPTV increases upto 35% by reducing packet losses at Access Point (AP), compared to User Datagram Protocol (UDP). We further evaluate fairness of IPTV traffic in the presence of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic in the network. Our study concludes that IPTV using DCCP over IEEE 802.11n not only provides increased user's capacity but also co-exists fairly with TCP traffic.