Oriented Set-top Boxes Scalable Information System Design And Implementation

Information Publication System is kind of hardware and software combination which uses IP network to distribute structured materials that be renedered on electrical display terminals. Nowadays in airport, subway station, even in supermakets this kind of system can be found to display flight information, metro arrival time and products' description. Comparing with traditional advertisement channels, IPS takes precedence by supporting more types of content like video, slides and rolling texts and the ability to control mass terminals by central system, which could help to deliver designated content to target audience and achive better advertisement effect. In this way IPS has been a hot-spot for both researchers in campus and developers from industry.With this requirement on IPS, this article analyes current design and implementation of this system from home and aborad, and chooses to focus on IP network based STB rendering IPS system which could meet dynamic content specification and high quality playback with low cost. However this kind of system we analysed performs poorly in distributing large material files to mass terminal, for example the FTP based file distribution method takes rapidly more time to deal with mass terminals; while either the C/S based meta management system is not easy to develop and deploy or the B/S based system is not user-friendly in perview / monitoring functions due to limited components provided by browsers.Based on this research, we provides an STB plus J2EE application server based information publication system. For the inefficiency problem during file distribution problem, we take adavantage of P2P / Application Layer Multicast design patterns to develop a fast replication algorithm, which out performed unicast and FastReplica algorithms in our evaluation, while the overall time taked to cope with mass terminals does not grow remarkably. For the usability problem in Information Central, we adopted Ajax technology to make B/S application runs as powerful as C/S client. And we implemented FTP Drag and Drop applet, integrated VLC component to enhance application functionality, which make administration work more efficient.