Community Model for Smart TV over the Top Services

Abstract

We studied the current state-of-the-art of Smart TV, the challenges and the drawbacks. Mainly we discussed the lack of end-to-end solution. We then illustrated the differences between Smart TV and IPTV from network service provider point of view. Unlike IPTV, viewer of Smart TV's over-the-top (OTT) services could be global, such as foreign nationals in a country or viewers having special viewing preferences. Those viewers are sparsely distributed. The existing TV service deployment models over Internet are not suitable for such viewers as they are based on content popularity, hence we propose a community based service deployment methodology with proactive content caching on rendezvous points (RPs). In our proposal, RPs are intermediate nodes responsible for caching routing and decision making. The viewer's community formation is based on geographical locations and similarity of their interests. The idea of using context information to do proactive caching is itself not new, but we combined this with "in network caching" mechanism of content centric network (CCN) architecture. We gauge the performance improvement achieved by a community model. The result shows that when the total numbers of requests are same; our model can have significantly better performance, especially for sparsely distributed communities.