Quality-assured provisioning of IPTV services within the NGN environment

IPTV represents a solution for interactive television-like services. As the NGN has gained attention for the IP multimedia service delivery platform, IPTV has been recognized as the way to provide the key value-added services. However, IPTV differs from typical NGN-based voice and data services by the fact that it combines three conceptually unfamiliar (until now) components: streamed video, Web services, and NGN-based service control. Another difference is in the sense of the quality-assured service delivery that in the case of IPTV is much stricter for two reasons: it is more challenging to meet an end user's satisfaction in the case of television services, and there are issues of quality-assured provisioning of real-time multimedia services in an environment that is best-effort in its nature. In this article, possible approaches to NGN-based IPTV services assurance are presented from the QoE and QoS viewpoints. Current environments and an overview of the-standardization efforts are given. A proposal for a fully NGN-integrated quality-assured IPTV provisioning model is presented with an associated converged profile structure. The service-aware quality assurance approach is argued. The article investigates further NGN service delivery enhancements for quality-assured provisioning of IPTV services that until now remained unresolved. The objective of this article is to present the design of a realistic quality assurance model, establish the associated framework for NGN-based IPTV services delivery, and contribute to discussions and research activities. At the same time, the conclusions and the proposed models will serve as a framework for future efforts in our laboratory NGN testbed.