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Data transmission schemes for a new generation of interactive digital television

University of British Columbia

Interactive television (ITV) is an attractive technology, which changes the way TV viewers experience home entertainment. In this thesis, we design an interactive television system, which truly gives TV viewers freedom to control and individualize the presentation of TV program content. In this context, we present methods that add extra video and audio streams (called incidental streams) containing interactive content, to the transmission line of a digital TV system. The addition of these extra streams does not result in increasing the transmission bandwidth, nor in degrading the picture or sound quality of the main TV program content. Our design consists of two major transmission mechanisms for transmitting the incidental data, called deterministic and stochastic service classes. The deterministic service class is designed such that no incidental stream data packet is lost during transmission. On the other hand, the stochastic service class is designed such that some incidental data loss is possible; however, the data loss rate is bounded. We present a strategy based on scalable video coding, which in conjunction with the deterministic and stochastic service classes, achieves the best possible picture and sound quality for the incidental streams under the constraint of available bandwidth. We also present data transmission methods for the deterministic and the stochastic service classes. In the context of the deterministic service class, we employ a deterministic traffic model for modelling the traffic of main streams, and then design a data transmission scheme based on the 'Network Calculus' theory. In the context of the stochastic service class, we employ Hidden Semi- Markov Models (HSMM) for modelling the traffic of main streams. We then design a data transmission scheme based on the 'Effective Bandwidth' theory. Furthermore, we design a data multiplexing system for the transmitter head-end of the proposed interactive TV system. This includes a novel scheduling algorithm for controlling the multiplexing of incidental and main streams data packets. We present numerical results of simulation experiments, which support the theoretical methods presented in this thesis.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-12-02

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/16167

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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