An Infrastructure for Managing Residential Devices through the Declarative Environment of the Brazilian iDTV Middleware

This paper presents a proposal for communication between consumer electronic devices and interactive applications based on the Brazilian standard for Digital TV. The integration process among the involved technologies as well as the role of each element in the proposed infrastructure is described in details. The main goal of this infrastructure is to join together, in the same environment, software technologies such as the Digital TV middleware (Ginga-NCL), a framework for the management of Home Networks (OSGi), and communication technologies that are more appropriated to the Brazilian interactive Digital TV market. In order to validate this infrastructure, some scenarios involving wireless communication technologies and Set-Top Boxes are created. The use of this infrastructure proved to be appropriated to provide new applications and services used on Digital TV to the users.