An Integrated Service Information Architecture for Digital Broadcasting Receiver Middleware

Abstract

Recently, digital broadcasting gradually becomes the norm around the globe. Since, however, the existence of numerous disparate standards causes unnecessary cost and inconvenience to both set-top-box manufacturers and ordinary viewers, research on the integrated middleware for supporting diverse standards is required. Among other things, the Service Information module constitutes an integral part of such a middleware. Therefore, in this paper, as a first step towards a fully integrated receiver middleware, we propose an integrated Service Information module architecture that allows us to process heterogeneous Service Information seamlessly by adopting XML and the concept of self-parsing. This architecture makes it possible to add new tables to the existing standards and/or even allows a new standard to be incorporated into original code without any modification.