Measurement of IPTV traffic from an operative network

In this paper, we present measurement results of IP TeleVision (IPTV) multicast traffic collected from real of the FastWeb network. FastWeb is an ISP provider, which is the main broadband telecommunication company in Italy. The network relies on an IP architecture and, besides television channels, delivers to the user services such as data transfer and VoIP over a single broadband connection. The traffic we focus on consists of 83 high‐quality digital TV channels encoded using different MPEG‐2 encoders. The results show that, depending on the encoder and based on the bitrate, flows can be classified as being: 1‐VBR, i.e. with one typical value of the mean bit rate, 2‐VBR, i.e. two typical bitrate values are observed, and VBR. Measurement of the packet loss, jitter and inter‐packet gap show that, independently from the class, packet generation process of the flows can have various degrees of burstiness. Despite the packet level burstiness, average jitter is limited to few milliseconds and no packet loss was ever observed in the backbone. Moreover, the evolution of inter‐packet gap over time remains basically unchanged when observing a flow in different time periods. Our results prove that the FastWeb network is properly carrying IPTV traffic, and that today technology is mature to make TV over IP feasible and of good quality. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.