MHP‐OSGi convergence: a new model for open residential gateways

Abstract

Nowadays, we are living in a time of important technological changes that affect our lives at home and our communication with the outside world. Among them, the developments in Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) and the smart home field can be considered as particularly important. Related to the former, the new Set‐Top Boxes (STBs) are not only a decoder for digital television broadcast but also an entry point to the Information Society and a suitable platform to support the execution of interactive applications. With regards to the latter, the Residential Gateways (RGs) combine different network technologies to allow the connection of different electronics devices and appliances at home, not only with each other but also with the Internet. Since there is no widespread consensus about the configurations and functions of the RGs, we propose to coordinate the two aforementioned worlds by extending the functionality of STBs to become a RG. Our proposal consists of merging the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP), one of the main standard frameworks for IDTV, with Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the most widely used open platform to set up RGs. To overcome the radically different nature of these specifications—the function‐oriented MHP middleware and the service‐oriented OSGi framework—we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET. This application is able to bridge the gap between the two frameworks and make their interaction feasible. We also show how this proposal has the potential to enable the production of scenarios that cannot currently be put into practice in a natural way. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Integrating Interactive TV Services and the Web through Semantics

“…Finally, in terms of middleware infrastructure a very similar approach that integrates the MHP and OSGi platforms is presented in (Vilas et al, 2006). The architecture presented in (Vilas et al, 2006) relies on a hybrid MHP/OSGi component called XBundLET. This component serves as a proxy between the two platforms, enabling bidirectional service discovery and invocation.…”

“…Regarding the content, the technology used for video streaming is DVB-T, a widely adopted standard for digital TV. OSGi and MHP environments have different properties as they adopt different design principles (Vilas et al, 2006). In order to retain full compatibility with industry standards such as MHP and DVB, and still exploit the service openness and flexibility of OSGi, we decided to build a proxy bundle in the OSGi platform that conceals the nature of MHP applications from the rest of the system (MHP-OSGi Gateway).…”

Integrating Semantic Technologies with Interactive Digital TV

“…The work introduced in [21], consists of a low-level implementation of a platform, which is both OSGi and MHP compliant. It uses the notion of XbundLets, i.e.…”

“…The OSGi and MHP environments have different properties because they follow different design principles (see [21] for a relevant discussion). In order to retain full compatibility with industry standards such as MHP and DVB, and still harvest the service management flexibility of OSGi, we decided to build a delegate bundle in the OSGi platform that conceals the nature of MHP applications from the rest of the system.…”