Adaptive digital broadcasting associated service in home network environment

Abstract

Recently, the most challengeable and important trend of information technology is the convergence which means combining of different industry areas such as personal computers, telecommunication and television. More and more, the barrier of each technology is collapsing and it``s getting hard to define the technology in its own area only. In the sense of this trend, this paper deals with a convergence service that includes both digital broadcasting and home network. In order to address two different technologies together, a virtual scenario of broadcasting associated service (BAS) system including digital TV and home network environment is considered. And then the home network architecture for providing universal multimedia service in home network is discussed to make it possible to serve multimedia contents to heterogeneous network palyback environments. BAS is the new service model that expands data service of interactive broadcasting into home network environments. Until now interactive broadcasting application is considered to be always downloaded and executed on either settop or digital TV. But BAS interactive broadcasting concept can extend established figure of broadcasting to involve home network terminals in addition to typical settop box or digital television. According to BAS architecture interactive application is downloaded and executed on home network terminal and it interacts with settop box to provide associated service between the current broadcasting program and home network terminals. Another topic covered in this paper is multimedia adaptive service in home network environments. Home network will have more rich multimedia contents but the terminal and circumstance that the contents are played are fully different. Thus, adaptation should be considered to maximizes the quality of service and user experience. Though lots of research are already conducted about the adaptation problems, adaptation in home network environments is not freque...