From Noise to Zapping: Quality of Service Issues Affecting Internet TV Distribution

The Internet and the development and deployment of new access networktechnologies
has opened up for new information and communication applications.
The mobile or cellular networks have evolved from a facility for voice call to
today's IP only network. The evolution has also allowed for re-use of old and
available infrastructure for technologies that increases the available capacity far
beyond the original objective. The strive of having the Internet as the only
'carrier' for all applications, leads to change of transport channel for 'old' and
well-known and well-established services. The customer thus expects the old
behaviour - it is still the same service - but the changed channels makes the
applications behave dierently.

This thesis discusses performance parameters and monitoring with focus on Digital
Subscriber Line (DSL) links and TV over Internet (IPTV) or Video on
Demand (VoD). Studies of some typical disturbances that degrade the DSL
channel and their impact on IP datagram transportation, and thus on IPTV
Quality of Experience (QoE), are presented. Also, proling of VoD users for
pre-fetching and terminal caching is shown to be a possible path for increasing
the QoE and lower the network utilisation.