  One of the most important multimedia applications is Internet protocol TV
(IPTV) for next-generation networks. IPTV provides triple-play services that
require high-speed access networks with the functions of multicasting and
quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Among optical access networks, Ethernet
passive optical networks (EPONs) are regarded as among the best solutions to
meet higher bandwidth demands. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for
multicasting live IPTV traffic in optical access network. The proposed
mechanism involves assigning a unique logical link identifier to each IPTV
channel. To manage multicasting, a prior storing server in the optical line
terminal (OLT) and in each optical network unit (ONU) is constructed. In this
work, we propose a partial prior storing strategy that considers the changes in
the popularity of the video content segments over time and the access patterns
of the users to compute the utility of the objects in the prior storage. We
also propose to partition the prior storage to avoid the eviction of the
popular objects (those not accessed frequently) by the unpopular ones which are
accessed with higher frequency. The popularity distribution and ageing of
popularity are measured from two online datasets and use the parameters in
simulations. Simulation results show that our proposed architecture can improve
the system performance and QoS parameters in terms of packet delay, jitter and
packet loss.
