Evaluation of a background push download service for personal multimedia devices

This paper presents the evaluation of an IP-multicast push download service for personal multimedia devices. The service under study uses residual bandwidth in communication networks (in this case, terrestrial broadcast) to push multimedia content to storage capacity in personal multimedia devices. The service has been evaluated through an application prototype for mobile TV systems. Results show that the addition of AL-FEC mechanisms achieves constant effective transmission rates, independently of the size of the content sent.