154 research outputs found

    TechNews digests: Autumn 2004

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    TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

    Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

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    The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

    Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

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    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

    Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

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    Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

    Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

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    Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

    Plataformas broadcast/multicast para redes móveis (mobile TV)

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    Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaO MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services), uma evolução das redes UMTS, é um sistema que permite o envio de conteúdo via broadcast e multicast através redes móveis, como por exemplo a video-conferência, partilha de ficheiros e o streaming de áudio e vídeo (Mobile TV). Este envio de informação é do tipo ponto-multiponto, ou seja, existe apenas uma fonte que envia a informação para múltiplos receptores, ao invés do que acontece com as ligacões ponto-a-ponto. Consequentemente, o uso dos recursos da rede é optimizado. Com o MBMS surge uma nova entidade denominada por BM-SC (Broadcast Multicast Service Center) que funciona como uma interface entre os fornecedores de conteúdo e o resto da rede móvel. Esta entidade contém informação relacionada com os serviços disponibilizados pelo operador, os subscritores dos mesmos e desempenha funcionalidades como a autenticação, autorização, facturação, entre outras. O BM-SC está directamente ligado ao GGSN (Gateway GPRS Support Node) através das interfaces Gi (dados) e Gmb (sinalização). A sinalização entre estes dois nós é feita a partir da troca de mensagens AAA (autenticação, autorização e accounting) baseadas no protocolo Diameter. Assim, numa primeira fase, e para além da arquitectura MBMS, esta dissertação aborda o principal objectivo deste trabalho, ou seja, todo o procedimento realizado tendo em vista a implementação da sinalização entre o BM-SC e o GGSN através de uma implementação do protocolo Diameter já existente. Este procedimento engloba inicialmente o estudo do protocolo Diameter, através de uma análise à sua arquitectura e à constituição das mensagens que o mesmo disponibiliza. Após a identificação de todos os procedimentos de sinalização entre o GGSN e o BM-SC, são abordados os passos que conduziram à implementação da interface Gmb através de uma aplicação em linguagem Java baseada numa máquina de estados. Assim, resulta daí uma aplicação onde eventos como o envio ou recepção de mensagens Diameter implicam acções específicas como o processamento da autorização de um utilizador para determinado serviço MBMS. Numa segunda fase, esta dissertação contempla a evolução que hoje em dia se tem vindo a verificar no MBMS através da integração com outras tecnologias. A necessidade desta evolução prende-se com a crescente competição que existe entre o MBMS e outras tecnologias similares, como é o caso do DVB-H, DMB e do MediaFLO, e fundamentalmente pela necessidade de obter uma visão do MBMS para além do 3G, assegurando assim uma maior longevidade da tecnologia. Uma dessas integrações, o IMS-MBMS proposto pelo projecto C-MOBILE e ao qual eu estive ligado, obtém nesta dissertação um maior destaque. Deste modo são abordadas as motivações que estiveram por trás da convergência do IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) com o MBMS, a arquitectura que surge desta convergência e a nova sinalização entre as entidades que resulta da distribuição das funcionalidades do BM-SC pela arquitectura integrada. ABSTRACT: MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services), an enhancement of the UTMS networks, is a system capable of sending both broadcast and multicast content in mobile networks, such as video-conference, file sharing and audio/video streaming (Mobile TV). This data transmission is point-tomultipoint, i.e., there is only one source sending information to multiple receivers, contrary to point-to-point connections. Therefore, the use of network resources is optimized. Along with MBMS comes a new entity called BM-SC (Broadcast Multicast Service Center) that represents an interface between the content providers and the mobile network. This entity contains all the information related to the available services, its subscribers and functionalities such as authentication, authorization, billing, among others. The BM-SC is directly connected to GGSN (Gateway GPRS Support Node) through Gi (data) and Gmb (signalling) interfaces. The signaling process between these two nodes is done through the exchange of AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) messages based on the Diameter protocol. Therefore, in a first phase, besides the MBMS architecture, this document focuses in the main objective of this work, i.e., the whole process taken to implement the signaling between the BM-SC and the SGSN using an already existing Diameter protocol implementation. This process initially involves the study of the Diameter Protocol, through the analysis of both its architecture and messages. After the identification of all signalling procedures that occur between the GGSN and the BM-SC, the steps that lead to the Gmb interface implementation through a Java application based on a state machine are addressed. Thus, it results an application where events like the sending or reception of Diameter messages involve specific actions like a user authorization procedure for a particular MBMS service. In a second phase, this document describes the evolution that is happening nowadays in MBMS through the integration of other technologies. The need to evolve is due to the growing competition between MBMS and other similar technologies such as DVB-H, DMB and MediaFLO, but mainly because of the need to get a MBMS vision beyond 3G, thus ensuring greater longevity of the technology. One of these integrations, the IMS-MBMS proposal by the C-MOBILE project (on which I was involved), obtains a particular focus on this document. Thus, the motivations behind the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and the MBMS convergence, the resulting architecture and the new signaling process between the entities after the redistribution of the BM-SC functionalities among the integrated architecture are dealt with
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