Design and implementation of an Electronic Service Guide for Mobile Video Systems

We study the problem of designing a configurable testbed for mobile TV research. Using simulations to conduct experiments on mobile TV may not reproduce real life field scenarios and challenges. To address this problem, we design and implement a configurable Electronic Service Guide (ESG) server capable of delivering TV programming information to mobile TV subscribers and communicating tuning and multimedia encoding information to mobile devices. We also implement link layer signaling mechanism for the testbed and integrate all components for an end-to-end mobile TV system for research. We validate the implementation with a variety of tools such as offline and USB based online transport stream analyzers capable of capturing and analyzing signals in real time. Furthermore, we complement our stream analysis with a live demonstration of the ESG server.