A peer‐to‐peer IPTV service architecture for the IP multimedia subsystem

During these last years the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service and the different peer‐to‐peer (P2P) technologies have generated an increasing interest for the developers and the research community that find in them the solution to deal with the scalability problem of media streaming and reducing costs at the same time. However, despite of the benefits obtained in Internet‐based applications and the growing deployment of commercial IPTV systems, there has been a little effort in combining them both. With the advent of the next‐generation‐network platforms such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which advocates for an open and inter‐operable service infrastructure, P2P emerges as a possible solution in situations where the traditional streaming mechanisms are not possible or not economically feasible.