A Reconfigurable, General-purpose DSM-CC Architecture and User Preference-based Cache Management Strategy

In current digital broadcasting systems, GEM(Globally Executable MHP)-based middlewares such as MHP(Multimedia Home Platform), OCAP(OpenCable Application Platform), ACAP(Advanced Common Application Platform) are the norm. Despite much of the common characteristics shared, such as MPEG-2 and DSM-CC(Digital Storage Media-Command and Control) protocols, the information and data structures they need are slightly different, which results in incompatibility issues. In this paper, in line with an effort to develop an integrated DTV middleware, we propose a general-purpose, reconfigurable DSM-CC architecture for supporting various standard GEM-based middlewares without code modifications. First, we identify DSM-CC components that are common and thus can be shared by all GEM-based middlewares. Next, the system is provided with middleware-specific information and data structures in the form of XML. Since the XML information can be parsed dynamically at run time, it can be interchanged either statically or dynamically for a specific target middleware. As for the performance issues, the response time and usage frequency of DSM-CC module highly contribute to the performance of STB(Set-Top-Box). In this paper, we also propose an efficient application cache management strategy and evaluate its performance. The performance result has shown that the cache strategy reflecting user preferences greatly helps to reduce response time for executing application.