DTV for Personalized Mobile Access and Unified Home Control

Abstract

Today, all devices are trying to connect and communicate each other. There is an increasing trend for self-configuring networks that allow devices to easily and automatically join and leave networks and learn about other connected devices. Digital television (DTV) is one of the most significant developments in recent digital technologies. It will become a natural center of the digital home because of its rich functionality and simplicity of use. In this paper, we present a home networking system to show the newly developed technologies that allow DTV and mobile phone to deliver complete new experiences to the end users.

In order to achieve a total and seamless connectivity, a mobile DTV (MDTV)-centric home network architecture has been proposed and implemented. First, a MDTV link protocol is designed and implemented in the home network system to connect DTV and mobile phone. Once connected, the mobile phone provides the wireless connectivity to Internet and also acts as an identifier for the personal data access, DTV is used as a displayer. Then, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol and Simple Control Protocol (SCP) are implemented to guarantee a total connectivity of all home devices. The enhanced DTV provides features of service discovery and ubiquitous home devices control, and web browsing. In the proposed home network system, the DTV is the central control point situated at home, users can use remote control at home or mobile phone away from home to access or control home devices. Our experiments have showed that the proposed home network system provides a simple and unified home device control and access. The MDTV architecture alone accomplishes an instant personalized mobile access anytime, anywhere.

The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35618-1_37