Manageability of Java-based digital TV receivers

The hardest problems of network management are frequently not modeling, abstracting, filtering, or propagation of management information; they are the extraction of management information from the resources being managed. This process is commonly referred to as the management instrumentation of resources. Although a variety of new systems are being designed and deployed on a continuous basis, it is still a rare occasion that these systems are designed and instrumented to be managed. We show how management instrumentation can be simply and powerfully accomplished if management provisions are made in the design of the managed resource. We look at digital television receivers and their Java applications as standardized by the Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC). We model the applications lifecycle of these applications using the ITU-T X.731 State Management function, and outline the corresponding applications and management Java APIs.