Network and Service Discovery in Heterogeneous Broadcast Environment

This paper concerns network and service discovery problems in heterogeneous broadcast environment. Broadcasting has traditionally been limited to single network type. The future broadcasting landscape will be composed of different type of networks, especially the mobile broadcast networks like DVB-H, DMB, WLAN, WiMAX and 3G MBMS. Integration of these networks into a unified broadcast infrastructure requires extensions to the current network and service discovery methods. Existing methods are limited to a single network type which makes them cumbersome. There is a possibility to considerably improve this process by unifying the network and service discovery across different broadcast networks. The process can also be helped by utilizing location databases. In this paper, we propose a Universal Network and Service Discovery (UNSD) system and positioning information system which provides discovery support for many different network types and inclusion of positioning information.