Designing an Efficient and Extensible Mobile TV Testbed

1
Designing an Efficient and Extensible Mobile TV
Testbed

• Cheng-Hsin Hsu
• Simon Fraser University, Canada
• joint work with Mohamed Hefeeda,
• Yi Liu, and Cong Ly

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Mobile TV Service

• Broadcast mass-market programs to subscribers
• Mobile devices have stringent energy budgets
• Devices receive a data burst and turn off
  receiving circuits until the next burst ? called
  time slicing

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Mobile TV Networks
Content Providers
Network Operators
Streaming Server
Multiplexer (IP Encapsulator)
Modulator/ Amplifier
Camera
IP Networks
ASI Networks

• Program feeds are IP streams from streaming
  servers or cameras
• Multiple TV programs are multiplexed AND time
  sliced by a multiplexer into a MPEG-2 TS stream
• The MPEG-2 TS stream is modulated, amplified, and
  broadcast to mobile devices

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Problem Statement

• Design a mobile TV base station for academic
  prototyping and cost-efficient small- to
  medium-size deployments
• platform to analyze energy consumption, channel
  switching delay, no. broadcast programs, and
  perceived streaming quality
• 10-20 TV channels with a commodity PC or low-end
  server

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Current Solutions (1/2)

• Commercial Base Stations
• expensive, e.g., a single EXPWAY FastESG server
  costs 75k USD Sarri09
• a complete base station costs even more

Need a more cost-efficient base station!
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Current Solutions (2/2)

• Open-Source Base Station FATCAPS
• too many disk I/Os
• does not scale well
• too many utilities with no admin interface

Need a better design!
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Design Goals

• G1 Higher efficiency and scalability
• avoid disk I/Os and memcpys
• G2 Utilization of multi-core processors
• pipelined structure to allow parallelism
• G3 Integrated software solution
• centralized admin interface
• G4 Better extensibility
• future supports for other networks such as
  MediaFLO, WiMAX, and MBMS

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Design Decisions (1/3)

• D1 Use Burst as the unit of time slicing,
  encapsulation, and transmission.
• Burst is self-contained with IP payloads and
  headers/trailers of all protocols
• No disk I/Os for intermediate data
• No memcpys for IP payloads

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Design Decisions (2/3)

• D2 Divide the base station into three indep.
  Phases, which are connected by two priority queue
• pipelined and parallelism

Empty Burst
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Design Decisions (3/3)

• D3 Implement a centralized Configuration
  Manager to allow save/restore settings
• interface with Web GUI for management
• D4 Modularized design for future extensions
• For example, MPE-FEC Burst is a subclass of MPE
  Burst

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Software Architecture
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High-Level Design
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Design of Burst Schedulers
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Design of Burst Readers
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Design of Bursts
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Design of Encapsulators
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Design of Transmitter
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Design of PSI/SI Tables

• PAT program association
• PMT program map
• NIT network information
• INT IP/MAC notification
• SDT service description
• TDT time and date

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Design of Configuration Manager
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Testbed Setup
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Future Work

• Web GUI for configuration management Cong
• MPE-FEC support Hamed
• PSI/SI table implementation Farid
• StreamReader classes Som
• Flute server integration
• ESG files implementation

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Conclusions

• Presented layout of general broadcast network
• Outlined design goals of a broadcast base station
• Described our design decisions and system
  architecture
• Presented the high-level system design and
  detailed design for each component
• Highlighted future work

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Thank You, and Questions?
More details can be found online at
http//nsl.cs.sfu.ca