Reducing IPTV channel zapping time based on viewer's surfing behavior and preference

This paper presents a method of prejoining the expected next TV channels for reducing IPTV channel zapping time with a consideration of the channel surfing behavior and the particular preference of each viewer. In this method, a home gateway of multicast protocol proxy for set-top boxes (STB) prejoins the expected and preferred channels based on aggregated data from STBs. The experimental results show that the method improves the prediction accuracy of prejoin channels with little network bandwidth overhead, which leads to reduce the channel zapping time for IPTV services.