Hybrid interactive data service architecture over T-DMB with mobile network

Abstract

There have been lots of technical developments in broadcasting field since 1990s. Providing high quality video and audio is one improvement and supporting mobile reception in a high-speed vehicle is another. Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB) is one of the successfully deployed technologies to provide mobile broadcasting service. One of the major breakthroughs achieved by T-DMB in addition to robust vehicular reception is a system architecture naturally enabling integrated interactive data services, which is defined by MPEG-4 System architecture composed of Object Descriptor Framework and Binary Format for Scene (BiFS) technology. However, interactive service in T-DMB has two fundamental limitations. First, interactive data service should be always rendered on top of a video due to the T-DMB specification. Second, initial data for interactive service is only received by broadcasting channel. These limitations prevent the implementation of emerging data service recently deployed widely by the smart handheld devices such as personalized data service customized for the user characteristics or location-based data service. Therefore, this paper proposes the architecture of hybrid interactive data service (HIDS) for T-DMB to overcome these limitations by defining a hybrid BIFS, which supports individual scene descriptions delivered from broadcasting and mobile channels, and is accessed from the local memory. This proposed architecture also maintains backward compatibility with the already deployed legacy T-DMB receivers.