Dvb-based Data Broadcasting And Client-side Development Of The Digital Set-top Boxes

With the rapid development of Information Highway, the Internet based applications have transferred from single services to integrated services, which provide the data, voice, image, and movie services to the consumers. Nowadays, the widely application of optical fibers in backbone networks make a great breakthrough in the throughput of the trunk networks. However, the traditional twisted-pair copper wires are still being used in the access networks. They can not meet the increasing requires of broadband based services and became the bottleneck for the development of Information Highway. Owing to its fast development and innate broadband nature, digital TV systems, especially CATVIHIFC networks, are competitive candidates for broadband access networks, which meet the bandwidth requirements of convergence of video, voice and Internet data services. One of the key technologies for broadband data service on CATV network is data broadcasting. This thesis presents a study on the principle and an implementation of that topic. Chapter 1 gives a brief survey on digital TV systems, its principle and development, introducing the architecture and standards of HFC networks. Finally DVB data broadcasting is introduced, covering its concepts and standardization. Chapter 2 presents a reference system model of interactive networks. The principles of MPEG-2 and DVB are introduced. Based on that, data broadcasting on CATV networks are studied, with an emphasis on Multiprocol Encapsulation (MPE) method. Chapter 3 is a systematic study on digital Set-Top-Box, introducing its service function, mechanism, hardware and software architecture. DVB Multimedia Home Plafform (DVB-MHP), the European standard for SIB, is introduced. In Chaper 4, an implementation of DVB-based data broadcasting system on CATV networks is presented. Its back-end SIB is introduced in detail, focusing on the development of an NE2000-compliant ethernet driver under pSOSystem environment. Finally the future extension for the system is discussed.