The Design And Implementation Of The Integration Of Digital TV Middleware & Conditional Access System

Digital TV middleware provides an ideal, open and standard technical platfolm for interactive applications. It makes the STB applications independent of platforms, improves the efficiency of application development and lowers porting costs, and applications can be upgraded and ported easily. CAS is the kernel part of digital TV system. It is an end-to-end addressing system controlling program and subscriber. If middleware is introduced, then the integration of middleware and CAS on STB is necessary. Based on the author's in-depth study on middleware and CAS, this paper is to implement the integration of a kind of foreign middleware based on MHP standard and a Chinese CAS. The point of introducing middleware is that it can change the old vertical market into a new horizontal market and lead the accurate division of industry so that the whole industry will be more professional and mature. STB provider will transform into STB hardware manufacturers, and STB hardware, as a general product, can achieve large-scale production and use the sales channels of consumer electronics. Service provider develops value-added applications on middleware platform and will become the power source to promote value-added service development. The cooperation of operator and service provider, to some extent, can reduce the operation risks which may be caused when the STB provider doesn't provide enough support, rely less on customer service and support and get security assurance in cases.This paper starts from the basic knowledge of digital TV, and analyses each part of digital TV signal process, such as signal source encoding, elementary stream, program multiplexing, system multiplexing, scrambling, channel encoding, digital modulation and signal processing of receiving device. It makes in-depth study on the related standards of MHP and CAS, and analyses the important technology involved, such as encryption technology, scrambling technology, Java technology, etc.By introducing the MHP, CAS formed the framework to explain the working principle of the system and the system main functions of the various components. It lays a solid foundation for how to design and implementation of the integration of MHP & CAS. The design and implementation of the integration of MHP & CAS is the important part of this paper. According to the concept of software engineering, the project management plan is made and the milestone of each phase is specified. Started from the business requirement of MHP and CAS integration, the requirements are analyzed in details, and the architecture, communication mechanism, and interface are designed in outline. The sub-module is put into detailed design and coding, too.After the integration of MHP and CAS on STB, the test cases covering the integration part are designed and 4 MHP applications (EPG, IPPV, MAIL, CARD) are developed as test tools according to test cases. The integration system will be verified by these four applications.The last part is the summary of the work done during the author's subject study, and analyses the existing problems and the future research direction according to the present situation.