Sunday 20 March 2011

Home Networks for IPTV distribution

In many cases, the Residential Gateway that provides connectivity with the Broadband Access network is not located in close proximity to the IPTV Set-Top Box. This scenario becomes very common as service providers start to offer service packages with multiple Set-Top Boxes per subscriber.

Traditional home networking technologies such as Ethernet and 802.11 do not provide a good solution to provide connectivity between the Gateway and each Set-Top-Box. Most homes today are not wired with Ethernet cable in every room, and installing new Ethernet cables is expensive for service providers and undesirable for consumers. Wireless technologies like 802.11 are optimized for data transmission, but they usually don't provide the Quality of Service required by IPTV applications.

Networking technologies that take advantage of existing home wiring (such as power lines,[36][37] phone lines or coaxial cables[38][39]) have become a popular solution for this problem, although fragmentation in the wired home networking market has limited somewhat the growth in this market.[40][41]

On December 2008, ITU-T adopted Recommendation G.hn (also known as G.9960), which is a next generation home networking standard that specifies a common PHY/MAC that can operate over any home wiring (power lines, phone lines or coaxial cables).[42]
IMS architecture for IPTV

There is a growing standardization effort on the use of the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as an architecture for supporting IPTV services in carriers networks. Both ITU-T and ETSI are working on so-called "IMS-based IPTV" standards (see e.g. ETSI TS 182 027[43]). The benefits of this approach are obvious. Carriers will be able to offer both voice and IPTV services over the same core infrastructure and the implementation of services combining conventional TV services with telephony features (e.g. caller ID on the TV screen) will become straigthforward.[44] The MultiService Forum recently conducted interoperability of IMS-based IPTV solutions during its GMI event in 2008

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