Monitoring IPTV quality of experience in overlay networks using utility functions

Service Overlay Networks (SONs) allow new, complex services to be created without the need to alter the underlying physical infrastructure. They represent a strong candidate for delivering IPTV services over the Internet׳s best effort service. The dynamic nature of overlays in terms of freedom of nodes to join and leave the network, and frequent changes in network conditions make their management a tedious, time consuming task. This paper proposes a manager election and selection scheme to elect nodes that will monitor and analyze IPTV Quality of Experience (QoE) delivered over overlay networks. Then, a simple, yet effective, utility function is proposed to analyze the monitored data in order to infer IPTV QoE based on Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. We assess the performance of the proposed schemes using simulations.