Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Interactive Digital Terrestrial Television: The Interoperability Challenge in Brazil

This paper introduces different standards implemented in existing Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting systems to allow the fruition of interactive services and applications through digital Set Top Boxes. It focuses on the interoperability issue between the Brazilian and the European architectures. In fact, despite in Brazil the GEM specification has been designed to foster wide content compatibility across a range of interactive platforms, it has never come to a final implementation and deployment. As a result the interoperability issue has been deeply explored in the BEACON project and an innovative system architecture has been developed to deploy t-learning services across Europe and Brazil, providing integration of those systems that were not able to interoperate until nowadays. This work is an important step in the direction of standards' interoperability. As a result, MHP and Ginga NCL-Lua implementation appeared to be the very best choice to deliver interactive services in an interoperable mode between European and Brazilian digital television

On Protocols for Information Security Services

Now-a-days, organizations are becoming more and more dependent on their information systems due to the availability of high technology environment.Information is also treated as vital like other important assets of an organization. Thus, we require Information Security Services (ISS) protocols to protect this commodity. In this thesis, investigations have been made to protect information by developing some ISS protocols. We proposed a key management protocol, which stores one-way hash of the password at the server, instead of storing plaintext version of password.Every host and server agrees upon family of commutative one-way hash functions. Due to this prevention mechanism, online and offline guessing attacks are defeated. The protocol provides host authentication. As a result, man-in-the-middle attack is averted. It also withstands malicious insider attack

Mobile Web applications

This document presents the work that was elaborated at the company Present Technologies as part of the academic discipline Internship/Industrial Project for the Master’s degree in Informatics and Systems, Software Development branch, at Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra. The area of the mobile web applications has grown exponentially over the last few years turning it into a very dynamic field where new development platforms and frameworks are constantly emerging. Thus, the internship consisted in the study of two new mobile operating systems, Tizen and Firefox OS, as well as two frameworks for packaging of mobile web applications – Adobe PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. These platforms are in the direct interest of Present Technology since it pretends to use them in its future projects in general and in the Phune Gaming project in particular. Since Television is one of the Present Technologies’ business areas, during the course of the internship it was decided to perform additionally a study of two Smart TV platforms, namely Samsung Smart TV and Opera TV, which was considered as a valuable knowledge for the company. For each of the platforms was performed a study about its architecture, supported standards and the development tools that are provided, nevertheless the focus was on the applications and for this reason a practical case study was conducted. The case studies consisted in the creation of a prototype or packaging of an application, for the case of the packaging tools, in order to prove the feasibility of the applications for the Present Technologies’ needs. The outcome of the work performed during the internship is that it raised the awareness of Present Technology of the studied platforms, providing it with prototypes and written documentation for the platforms’ successful usage in future projects

Mobile Web applications

This document presents the work that was elaborated at the company Present Technologies as part of the academic discipline Internship/Industrial Project for the Master’s degree in Informatics and Systems, Software Development branch, at Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra. The area of the mobile web applications has grown exponentially over the last few years turning it into a very dynamic field where new development platforms and frameworks are constantly emerging. Thus, the internship consisted in the study of two new mobile operating systems, Tizen and Firefox OS, as well as two frameworks for packaging of mobile web applications – Adobe PhoneGap and Appcelerator Titanium. These platforms are in the direct interest of Present Technology since it pretends to use them in its future projects in general and in the Phune Gaming project in particular. Since Television is one of the Present Technologies’ business areas, during the course of the internship it was decided to perform additionally a study of two Smart TV platforms, namely Samsung Smart TV and Opera TV, which was considered as a valuable knowledge for the company. For each of the platforms was performed a study about its architecture, supported standards and the development tools that are provided, nevertheless the focus was on the applications and for this reason a practical case study was conducted. The case studies consisted in the creation of a prototype or packaging of an application, for the case of the packaging tools, in order to prove the feasibility of the applications for the Present Technologies’ needs. The outcome of the work performed during the internship is that it raised the awareness of Present Technology of the studied platforms, providing it with prototypes and written documentation for the platforms’ successful usage in future projects

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

IPTV open source

The continuous developments made on the network infrastructures allow to provide quality in multimedia services over-the-top. Also, mobile data traffic has been increasingly growing along with smartphone’s capabilities. This growth motivates the creation of multi-platform solutions that can target not only these devices but, in the case of the IPTV world, also the set-top-boxes, smart televisions and computers. HTTP streaming is a technique directed to stream over-the-top multimedia. Many global platforms make use of HTTP streaming, with names like Youtube or Netflix. In this work, a server architecture for streaming the public Portuguese channels as well as a multiplatform client architecture are proposed. The proposed software can be deployed on any regular server and provide extra functionalities such as tv listings. The client can run on any Media Source Extension (MSE) browser, without the need of any plugin like Flash. Finally, some tests were made on the two entities (server and client) in order to test the performance of the server and behaviour of the client through different network conditions.Os constantes desenvolvimentos a nível de infraestrutura de rede permitem fornecer serviços multimedia de qualidade sobre redes IP. Além disso, tráfego de dados em redes móveis tem crescido com o aumento de capacidades dos dispositivos móveis inteligentes, crescimento esse que motivou a criação de soluçõesmulti-plataformaquepodemdirecionarnãosóessesmesmosdispositivos, mas, no caso do mundo IPTV, também as set-top-boxes, televisores inteligentes e computadores. HTTP streaming é uma técnica direcionada a transmissão de dados multimedia sobre redes IP. Várias plataformas a nível global fazem uso de streaming HTTP, sendo Youtube ou Netflix dos exemplos mais conhecidos. Neste trabalho, é proposta uma arquitetura para um servidor de streaming dos canais públicos Portugueses, bem como, uma arquitetura de cliente multiplataforma. O software proposto pode ser implementado emqualquerservidorregularefornecerfuncionalidadesextra,comogrelhade programação. O cliente é suportado por qualquer navegador Media Source Extension (MSE) sem a necessidade de programas ou extensões adicionais, como o Flash. Finalmente, foram feitos alguns testes nas duas entidades (servidor e cliente) para testar o desempenho do servidor e o comportamento do cliente através de diferentes condições a nível de rede.Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic

Contributions to the design and development process of interactive applications for digital TV based on Ginga-NCL

Orientador: Yuzo IanoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: No entorno atual da televisão digital no Brasil, a interatividade é uma característica importante para se estabelecer uma plataforma de comunicação entre os usuários e as emissoras. O middleware Ginga, ainda em desenvolvimento, se apresenta como uma oportunidade para a interatividade por meio do Ginga-NCL, um framework que permite o desenvolvimento de aplicações usando as linguagens NCL e Lua. Porém, as formas de se implementar aplicações não são padronizadas, uma vez que os receptores no mercado são limitados em hardware e as aplicações nem sempre poderão ser executadas sem seguir algumas regras ou restrições para se otimizar as aplicações. Este trabalho oferece uma nova perspectiva sobre o desenvolvimento de gráfico de aplicações interativas, com técnicas para se otimizar os parâmetros limitantes, além de uma biblioteca de código aberto para se implementar um teclado virtual em qualquer aplicação Ginga-NCLAbstract: Interactivity for digital television is, nowadays, a very important feature to stablish a communication pathway between users and broadcasters, due to digital television's current status in Brazil. The Ginga middleware, still in development status, presents an opportunity for achieving interactivity via Ginga-NCL, a framework that allows application development and deployment using NCL and Lua programming languages. However, there are not standardised ways to develop applications, the currently available receivers in the market are very limited in hardware, and released applications will not be able to always execute flawlessly without standards or guidelines to optimise them. The author's work offers a new perspective on graphical environment development for interactive applications with techniques to optimise against the limiting factors, and presents an open-source library for implementing a virtual keyboard in any Ginga-NCL application as wellMestradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaMestre em Engenharia Elétric