Design and implementation of an end-to-end system for DTV multicasting to home over broadband IP access network

This paper describes design and implementation of an end-to-end system which implements digital television (DTV) multicasting to the home over broadband IP access network. We have developed a DTV-IP gateway for introducing DTV programs from broadcasting network into IP network with special considerations of the challenges, which consist of different service models and different protocols when deploying DTV services between the traditional satellite, cable or terrestrial network and the broadband IP network. According to different application scenario, the DTV-IP gateway can output two types of streams: CBR (constant bit-rate) transport stream (TS) over IP and VBR (variable bit-rate) TS over IP. Moreover, we have proposed a method to auto-regenerate the standard CBR TS from VBR TS over IP for the standard set-top-box (STB) with consideration of timing synchronization. This end-to-end system has been verified to work well in the broadband IP access network environment.