Secure and Reliable IPTV Multimedia Transmission Using Forward Error Correction

• Main Authors: Chi-Huang Shih, Yeong-Yuh Xu, Yao-Tien Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2012-01-01
• Series: International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/720791

With the wide deployment of Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure and rapid development of digital technologies, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has emerged as one of the major multimedia access techniques. A general IPTV transmission system employs both encryption and forward error correction (FEC) to provide the authorized subscriber with a high-quality perceptual experience. This two-layer processing, however, complicates the system design in terms of computational cost and management cost. In this paper, we propose a novel FEC scheme to ensure the secure and reliable transmission for IPTV multimedia content and services. The proposed secure FEC utilizes the characteristics of FEC including the FEC-encoded redundancies and the limitation of error correction capacity to protect the multimedia packets against the malicious attacks and data transmission errors/losses. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme obtains similar performance compared with the joint encryption and FEC scheme.