Transmission System Planning And Designing For Foshan Broadcasting Group’s CATV-based HDTV-interactive Services

The process of the domestic Broadcasting Networking Convergence (BNC) is nowgearing up faster and faster accompany with the announce of 《The experimental solution forThree-Networking-Convergence (TNC)》 by the State Council, and the InteractiveHigh-Resolution Digital TV(iHDTV),as the theme of the second procedure of BNC, isaccepted by more and more Cable TV Operators(CATVO). To build an adaptable and robustoperation platform is crucial to meet the future value-added business.[1]In2012, Foshan, one of the second batch TNC experiment cities, directed, planned andcarried by Guangdong CATV, set the first-stage goal of iDHTV platform construction. Theauthor of this paper, me, was involved in the Transmission Platform(TP) planning anddesigning and its implement.The design target that Foshan iHDTV construction solution aim at is to provide ahigh-capacity, high-performance, ease-to-maintain, open and extendable platform withQuality of Service(QoS) guarantee to support the future TNC business operation.This paper will focus on these following issues: the architecture of the transmissionsubsystem, the planning of the frequency resources, the arrangement of time-shifts and IPaddresses, the estimation module for capacity and stress testing and the data flow design.Foshan iHDTV platform, designed to suit the goals described above, bases on DTVmaster Local Leading Station (LLS) to support distributed deployment of160000concurrentvideo streams and to cover250thousand end users at the beginning stage. In the transmissionsubsystem, a Data Metropolitan Area Network (DMAN), based on IP backbone network andBidirectional HFC Network (bi-HFC), is built to deliver interactive media-stream service, viaIPQAM devices to HFC, as IP data packets, on the end users’ Set Top Boxes (STB) in the end.The design of Foshan iHDTV transmission platform has been built basically and passedthe initial release testing to end users. Foshan Broadcasting Inc. is now running its iHDTVservices that including Standard-Resolution or High-Resolution Digital TV programs and itsVOD services, time shift TV, information browsing, NPVR, TV games, video Telecom and soon, and therefore the company has transformed successfully from a CATV Provider into acomprehensive multimedia information service carrier.