Implementation of the storage manager for an IPTV set-top box

Abstract

An IPTV set-top box provides a variety of interesting services such as VOD (Video On Demand), PVR (Personal Video Recorder), game, TV shopping as well as live TV broadcast. In order to support various interactive services of IPTV, more elaborate software should be equipped within the set-top box. In this paper, we present the implementation of a storage manager used in the IPTV set-top box. Like general purpose computer systems, softwares within the set-top box form a layered architecture which consists of a set of applications, an operating system, and device drivers. Each software component has its own functions, and communicates with other components through welldefined interfaces. However, the fixed interfaces often become a barrier in delivering some important information to other layers. For example, because of the POSIX interface defined a long time ago, media players with soft real-time requirements cannot deliver the QoS information to the operating system efficiently. To address this problem, we propose a new approach that provides the QoS services by using only the file attributes without modifying the existing interfaces. We implemented our prototype system Daphne on the Linux operating system. Through the experiments by measurements, we show that the proposed approach is effective in guaranteeing the QoS.