Mobile broadcasting: Advanced services using innovative electronic service guides

This paper introduces an extended signaling data structure for mobile broadcast handheld terminals. Existing bearer specifications such as DVB-H already support the transmission of IP-based broadcast data to the terminal. On higher layers, further specifications are necessary which define mechanisms such as signaling structures and transmission protocols. For DVB-H, the standards DVB IP Datacast and OMA Broadcast Service Enabler may be used. They enable broadcast services such as mobile TV or basic interactivity. The signaling extensions introduced in this paper are designed to extend the existing signaling mechanisms of the mentioned specifications and enable entirely new types of use cases by following a module-based approach which allows to define complex signaling structures consisting of numerous stream-based or file-based broadcast packages with explicit interrelations. At first, a detailed description of possible future use cases are given in the paper. Based on that, the existing signaling mechanisms are validated and possible extensions are defined and illustrated by using a complex signaling example. Finally, the software components which are necessary on the terminal to manage and operate the extended signaling structure, are described.