Managing Wireless IPTV in Multimedia Home Networking

In-home wireless networks are now wide-spreading as today's home network is composed of at least one wireless network. The dramatic increase of traffic makes it difficult to guarantee user experience. In this paper, we focus on wireless IPTV service that needs to be guaranteed by service provider. It is particularly complicated to manage because of the shared and unstable condition of the wireless medium. Moreover, with stringent requirements at application layer, using UDP at transport layer and traditional MAC protocol at link layer can hardly result in satisfaction at users. Therefore, we investigate comparison of different combinations of transport and link layer performances for the delivery of IPTV. For validation, we use NS-3 and a realistic propagation generated with a real house description. We analyze impact of link layer (with or without coordination) and transport layer (UDP or TCP). Then, we propose a combined solution using TCP over a coordinated MAC protocol. The solution can be easily deployed in real products and is compatible with existing devices.