Mobile TV Research Articles

CloudMoV: Cloud-Based Mobile Social TV

The rapidly increasing power of personal mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) is providing much richer contents and social interactions to users on the move. This trend however is throttled by the limited battery lifetime of mobile devices and unstable wireless connectivity, making the highest possible quality of service experienced by mobile users not feasible. The recent cloud computing technology, with its rich resources to compensate for the limitations of mobile devices and connections, can potentially provide an ideal platform to support the desired mobile services. Tough challenges arise on how to effectively exploit cloud resources to facilitate mobile services, especially those with stringent interaction delay requirements. In this paper, we propose the design of a Cloud-based, novel Mobile sOcial tV system (CloudMoV). The system effectively utilizes both PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) cloud services to offer the living-room experience of video watching to a group of disparate mobile users who can interact socially while sharing the video. To guarantee good streaming quality as experienced by the mobile users with time-varying wireless connectivity, we employ a surrogate for each user in the IaaS cloud for video downloading and social exchanges on behalf of the user. The surrogate performs efficient stream transcoding that matches the current connectivity quality of the mobile user. Given the battery life as a key performance bottleneck, we advocate the use of burst transmission from the surrogates to the mobile users, and carefully decide the burst size which can lead to high energy efficiency and streaming quality. Social interactions among the users, in terms of spontaneous textual exchanges, are effectively achieved by efficient designs of data storage with BigTable and dynamic handling of large volumes of concurrent messages in a typical PaaS cloud. These various designs for flexible transcoding capabilities, battery efficiency of mobile devices and spontaneous social interactivity together provide an ideal platform for mobile social TV services. We have implemented CloudMoV on Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine and verified its superior performance based on real-world experiments.

Improving IPTV Forwarding Masechanism in IEEE 802.16j MMR Networks Based on Aggregation

Internet protocol television (IPTV) service depends on the network quality of service (QoS) and bandwidth of the broadband service provider. IEEE 802.16j mobile multihop relay Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access networks have the opportunity to offer high bandwidth capacity by introducing relay stations. However, to actually satisfy QoS requirements for offering IPTV services (HDTV, SDTV, Web TV, and mobile TV) for heterogeneous users’ requests, providers must use a video server for each IPTV service type, which increases the network load, especially bandwidth consumption and forwarding time. In this paper, we present a solution for forwarding IPTV video streaming to diverse subscribers via an 802.16j broadband wireless access network. In particular, we propose a new multicast tree construction and aggregation mechanism based on the unique property of prime numbers. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme reduces both bandwidth consumption and forwarding time.

Network mobility protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

SUMMARYThe goal of the network mobility management is to effectively reduce the complexity of handoff procedure and keep mobile devices connecting to the Internet. When users are going to leave an old subnet and enter a new subnet, the handoff procedure is executed on the mobile device, and it may break off the real‐time service, such as VoIP or mobile TV, because of the mobility of mobile devices. Because a vehicle is moving so fast, it may cause the handoff and packet loss problems. Both of the problems will lower down the throughput of the network. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel network mobility protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks. In a highway, because every car is moving in a fixed direction at a high speed, a car adopting our protocol can acquire an IP address from the vehicular ad hoc network through the vehicle‐to‐vehicle communications. The vehicle can rely on the assistance of a front vehicle to execute the prehandoff procedure, or it may acquire a new IP address through multihop relays from the car on the lanes of the same or opposite direction and thus may reduce the handoff delay and maintain the connectivity to the Internet. Simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme is able to reduce both the handoff delay and packet loss rate. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The effect of flow experience on user adoption of mobile TV

The wide broadband of third generation (3G) mobile communication technologies enables advanced mobile data services such as mobile TV. However, users’ adoption intention of mobile TV may decrease with their poor experience caused by the lack of usability, such as small screens and slow response. Drawing upon the flow theory, this research examined mobile TV user adoption. The results indicated that perceived ease of use, access speed and content quality have significant effects on the flow experience, which involves three dimensions: perceived enjoyment, perceived control and attention focus. In turn, flow experience affects perceived usefulness and usage intention. Thus, service providers need to present an engaging experience to users in order to facilitate their adoption and usage of mobile TV.

A resource allocation algorithm for OFDM-based cellular system serving unicast and multicast services

In this article, we propose a resource allocation algorithm for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based cellular system that serves users each of which requests a regular service or a multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS). We assume that the MBMSs are considered for video services such as mobile TV. In order to efficiently serve the users with heterogeneous channel conditions, we employed channel-adaptive video streams by using scalable video coding (SVC), where a realistic multicast configuration is considered for multicasting the SVC streams. Therefore, we designed the cellular system to serve constant and flexible bit rates for the regular services and the MBMSs, respectively. Thus, we consider three objectives when allocating the bandwidth resources, where total transmit power is regulated. First, the bit rate of each regular service has to be guaranteed. Second, the minimum bit rate of each MBMS for achieving the minimum video quality has to be guaranteed. Third, the average video quality of the users requesting MBMSs has to be maximized. In order to achieve the objectives, we propose to quantify the service quality of each service, and then find the resource allocation that maximizes the total service quality. By using the computer simulation results, we could verify that the three objectives can efficiently be achieved. Also, we could verify that the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to that of the previous algorithm designed to maximize the total bit rate while guaranteeing the minimum bit rates.

Energy efficient burst scheduling in mobile TV services

With the advancement of mobile communication technology, Mobile TV has emerged and is becoming increasingly popular. However, viewing is limited with battery-powered mobile devices. To reduce the energy consumption, burst transmission has been proposed for mobile devices. The optimal burst scheduling problem for energy saving has been proven to be NP-complete. This paper proposes a sub-optimal burst scheduling algorithm called Regulated Period Scheduling (RPS) for energy saving in Mobile TV networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the resulting energy saving of the proposed algorithm is about 10% greater than the state of the art algorithm can achieve while maintaining very low computation complexity.

Area-efficient convolutional deinterleaver for mobile TV receiver

In this article, a single-pointer structure is proposed for the convolutional deinterleavers of mobile TV receivers. To enhance the burst-error correcting capability, the convolutional interleaving and deinterleaving scheme is widely used in mobile TV receivers. However, a convolutional deinterleaver requires many pointer registers. This article introduces a single-pointer structure that reduces the number of pointer registers. Experimental results show that the single-pointer structure reduces the area of the convolutional deinterleaver by 70% in a mobile TV receiver.

A High Linearity VHF Programmable Gain LNA

A VHF (30MHz-300MHz) band digitally programmable low noise amplifier(LNA) has been implementedwith a 0.25um standard CMOS process for VHF CMMB mobile TV tuners. Utilizing a T-match input network, input matching of more than a decade bandwidth is achieved across all gain settings . Adoptingthe multiple gated technique, gain flatness enhancement and capacitor reuse etc. , the proposed LNA demonstrates 3 gain settings of 2 0 dB, 6 dB, - 9 dB with S11 below -12dB at every gain setting. At a power supply voltage of 2.5V, the LNA consumes less than 10mA curren t , -6dBm IIP 3 and a Noise Figure (NF) of less than 2.9 dB at 20dB gain setting over the VHF band.

Optimization of ATSC Mobile Handheld Service Capacity

Mobile TV has become a reality offered on several mobile delivery systems. Among them is the Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) system for mobile and handheld digital television services, known as ATSC Mobile DTV or ATSC M/H, which has moved from standardization to implementation. As the North American broadcast industry is preparing to provide Mobile DTV service to consumers, this work discusses important technical parameters that affect the TV service quality and capacity. Since additional error correction mechanisms were added to overcome mobile transmission problems, the available payload for M/H services is limited. This creates a need to efficiently use the available M/H bandwidth. The paper aims to optimize the Mobile DTV service capacity while maintaining an acceptable perceived quality. It presents tradeoffs between several factors affecting service capacity and signal robustness, which is prominent for designing Mobile TV broadcasting scenarios.

The Role of Perceived Cost toward on Continuance Intention of Mobile TV: Focused on Chinese users

This study highlight the role of perceived cost on user's continuance intention to use mobile TV service in china. We proposed research model based on the expectation-confirmation model(ECM) and reclaim 243 questionnaires from experienced users in china. Above all, the analysis results support significant relationship perceived variables, satisfaction, and continuance intention of mobile TV. First, while expectation confirmation has positive influence on perceived playfulness and satisfaction, the effect on perceived usefulness is not significant. Second, perceived cost can significantly predict perceived usefulness and satisfaction, however, we found no evidence of a statistically significant influence on perceived playfulness. Third, perceived usefulness and perceived playfulness have a positive influence on satisfaction, and perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and perceived playfulness have a positive influence on continuance intention. This results provide implications from both theoretical and managerial perspectives and the limitations have been discussed for future research.

A Survey on Content Adaptation Systems towards Energy Consumption Awareness

The availability of heterogeneous devices has rapidly changed the way people access the World Wide Web that includes rich content applications such as video streaming, 3D games, video conferencing, and mobile TV. However, most of these devices' (i.e., mobile phone, PDA, smartphone, and tablet) capabilities differ in terms of built-in software and library (what they can display), display size (how the content appears), and battery supply (how long the content can be displayed). In order for the digital contents to fit the target device, content adaptation is required. There have been many projects focused on energy-aware-based content adaptation that have been designed with different goals and approaches. This paper reviews some of the representative content adaptation solutions that have been proposed during the last few years, in relation to energy consumption focusing on wireless multimedia streaming in mobile devices. Also, this paper categorizes the research work according to different classifications of multimedia content adaptation requirements. In addition, we discuss some energy-related challenges content adaptation systems.

2978 – The age of the brain

The objective of the Age of the Brain is change the way people think about their brains and the conditions which affect it forever, and for the better. This will be achieved through our coordinated efforts as well as by stimulating thousands of other parties - governments, professional societies, patient groups, industry, pressure groups, trusts, individuals and a multitude of other organisations - to be part of this ongoing campaign. The brain is the most important organ in the body. Ignorance, epidemic across every level of society is having an impact on the health of our brains across the world. We believe it is time this stopped. By launching the Age of the Brain, a programme to raise awareness and educate across the world we plan to make a significant impact. This is about changing the way the people think about their brains for good. The programmes will be stimulating, thought-provoking and effective. We aim to challenge current perceptions and re-align incorrect and ignorant thinking but most importantly get people to take personal responsibility for their brain health and well being. The Age of The Brain is planning a huge central programme composed of: Interactive exhibitions both fixed and mobile iMax film Nine-part TV series PR and editorial and social media Ambassadors Schools and universities programme Science events Digital and online activities

Key management approach for secure mobile open IPTV service

In mobile open Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) which is one of the major attracting technologies recently, the security is a key issue for reliable service, because the mobility and the openness in IPTV could cause much more vulnerabilities to various attacks compared with traditional IPTV services. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and secure channel group key establishment and rekeying management scheme for mobile open IPTV services. Our scheme provides the data authentication between an Evolved Node B (eNB) or a Base Station and the mobile devices for the security enhancement and efficiently rekeys the group key when the membership changes. Additionally, it proposes a pairwise key establishment mechanism for open IPTV services through eNBs. Our proposal can cope with the security vulnerability in mobile open IPTV services and guarantee the secure group key rekeying in addition to decreasing the storage and communication overhead.

Integration of the digital broadcast mobile television network and the 3G network

The paper presents the results of the research into the opportunities for the integration of mobile broadcast TV networks and cellular 3G networks. We analyzed trends in mobile television services as well as previous studies that aim at finding optimal ways to integrate different types of networks. This paper analyzes the existing mobile television technology, with a special emphasis on the DVB-H technology. We analyzed the conditions, reasons and opportunities for the integration of DVB-H and 3G UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System), and the conclusions of these analyzes are supported with the results in practice. Based on these studies, a conclusion on the feasibility of the realization of DVBH/ UMTS hybrid networks is brought.

A CMOS RF front-end with linearized current-to-current converter and gate switching mixer

A CMOS RF front-end with a linearized current-to-current converter and a gate switching mixer for multiband and multistandard mobile TV tuners is proposed. A linearized current-to-current converter and a gate switching passive mixer merged with the linearized current-to-current converter are proposed to improve the linearity of the RF front-end. It is fabricated in a 0.13-μm CMOS process and draws 13, 15, and 15 mA from a 1.2 V power supply at VHF, UHF, and L-band operation, respectively. It shows a gain of more than 32 dB, NF of less than 2.5 dB, IIP2 of more than 35 dBm, and IIP3 of more than −10.5 dBm across all bands. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:247–250, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27309

Cross Layer Design for Efficient Video Streaming over LTE Using Scalable Video Coding

Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) offers high data rate capabilities to mobile users, and network operators are trying to deliver a true mobile broadband experience over LTE networks. Mobile TV and Video on Demand (VoD) are expected to be the main revenue generators in the near future, and efficient video streaming over wireless is the key to achieve this goal. Video services use both unicast and multicast video transmission based on its applications. Enhanced Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (EMBMS) is defined in 3GPP specification to support download delivery and streaming delivery to group users in LTE mobile networks. In 3GPP Release 8 specification, the EMBMS transmission is classified into single-cell transmission and MBSFN (Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network) transmission. In this paper, we propose a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) based video streaming scheme with dynamic adaptations and a scheduling scheme based on channel quality for unicast and multicast video transmissions. In our proposed unicast scheme, Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) feedbacks from User Equipment’s (UE) are used for dynamic adaptations and scheduling. Cross layer signaling between Medium Access Control (MAC) and Real Time Transport (RTP) protocols is used to achieve the channel dependent adaptation for unicast in video server. Simulation results for unicast indicate improved video quality for more number of users with reduced bit rate video traffic. Approximately 13% video quality gain is observed for users at the cell edge using this adaptation scheme. We have also proposed a scheduling scheme for multicast over MBSFN networks. This scheme optimizes the radio spectrum allocation by adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and frequency scheduling based on distribution of users in different channel quality regions. Through simulations we demonstrate that spectrum savings in the order of 72 to 82% is achievable in different user distribution scenarios with our proposed scheme.

Mobile TV White Space with Multi-Region Based Mobility Procedure

Current regulations require that portable unlicensed devices operating in TV white space perform a channel availability query (CAQ) before transmitting whenever they move more than 100m. Since this mobility constraint gives rise to frequent CAQs, the Federal Communications Commission allows a region-based mobility procedure (RMP) to help reduce the number of CAQs. Since the performance of the RMP cannot be precisely evaluated based only on the number of CAQs, in this letter, we formulate an achievable throughput in terms of the average number of available channels, the effective data transmission time, and the TV band database fees. We discover that the achievable throughput for the conventional single RMP is degraded when the radius of the region is not properly determined. In order to alleviate this performance degradation, we propose a multi-RMP using multiple radii in order to obtain multiple available channel lists. Simulation results show that the proposed multi-RMP can mitigate the performance degradation. In addition, the use of multi-RMP enhances the maximum throughput compared to the single RMP.

안드로이드 플랫폼에서 모바일 방송 모듈을 위한 시스템 개발

공중파 TV방송의 디지털 전환에 따른 막대한 자금이 투여되는 현 상황에서 지상파 방송의 매체 영향력은 신규의 유료 매체인 디지탈 케이블 TV 및 IPTV로 인해 감소될 가능성이 크기 때문에 신규 신성장 동력으로 모바일 TV시장을 확장이 필요하다. 국내 지상파방송 사업자들이 기존의 DMB사업으로 크게 성과를 보지 못하고 있는 실정에서 ATSC-M/H 기술 도입으로 방송 시스템 공급과 모듈의 수요가 증가할 것이 예상되고 있다. ATSC-M/H는 모바일 서비스를 위한 별도의 주파수 할당이 필요 없고 기존 ATSC 시스템에 간섭을 주지 않으면서 동시방송을 수행할 수 있는데, 안드로이드(Android) 휴대단말기 상에서 미국형 모바일 방송 수신 모듈을 개발하고자 한다. 본 논문은 안드로이드 플랫폼에서 임베디드 시스템이 적용되는 방송 모듈을 휴대 단말기에서 모바일 방송을 볼 수 있는 소프트웨어 모듈을 설계하고자 한다.

Market competitiveness of mobile TV industry in China

Mobile TV is listed as China's national priority to develop the triple play system. Fast-growing China Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting services (CMMB) leads China's mobile TV industry and forms the largest network globally. As mobile TV regulation and technology became stable after the initial stage, this study focuses on CMMB's competitiveness in market/industry subsystem. Using document analysis and expert interviews, it analyzes CMMB's institution-driven and market-driven forces in the Chinese 3G/4G telecommunication market. The socio-technical framework is incorporated with seven forces model to examine commercialized CMMB and investigates its market and technoculture in Shanghai. Institutionally, CMMB business structure was collapsed into three levels which managed extensive and diverse Chinese markets strategically through a unified platform. After the business model switched to a subscription model, CMMB's rollout slowed down but turned it into a sustainable business. Besides, analysis of market forces shows CMMB's good market competiveness due to strong support from suppliers, complementors, and distribution channels and little threat from rivals, new entrants, and substitutes. CMMB users have increasing switching cost because of improved content/services and devices and no data charge fee. In contrast, CMMB faces stronger threat from competitors and substitutes and less loyal consumers in Shanghai than on a national level. CMMB's rapid developmental path provides meaningful implications for other countries in establishing mobile multimedia networks. This study recommends a pro-innovative and technology-neutral regulatory approach to develop mobile TV. Finally, the socio-technical model is found useful for analyzing technological development at different stages and contexts.

Mobile TV Technologies

Mobile TV is a generalized term used for the technologies through which all the TV channels can be seen on our mobile phone. Using their mobile TV phone, people could enjoy real-time news, sports, weather forecasts and live entertainments in a fast-moving car, outdoors, and anywhere. Technologies are classified in Cellular and Broadcast. Cellular Network includes 3G, MBMS and TDtv. Broadcast services includes 1Seg, DMB, DVB-H and MediaFLO. Few platforms which provide this technology are Alcatel's Unlimited Mobile TV, Bharti Telesoft’s VDP, CyberLink Mobile TV Solution etc.