Design and Implementation of a Signaling Protocol to Transmit UHDTV Contents in the Cable Broadcast Network

Abstract

ltra high-definition television (UHDTV) is suggested as a next generation television technology beyond high-definition television (HDTV). In this paper, we propose the signaling protocol to transmit large-capacity UHDTV contents in the current cable broadcast network. The signaling protocol based on an in-band signaling is designed to minimize the change of the current cable network architecture. To send the channel bonding information from the headend to STBs, three kinds of 36 bits signaling message are designed. We describe procedures of the headend and the STB to serve UHDTV contents. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed signaling protocol, we implement a testbed system, which consists of a frame classifier, a frame merger, 1024-QAM transmitter/receiver, MPEG-2 TS Generator, and monitoring S/Ws. According to the testbed system, we can ascertain that 200Mbps UHDTV contents are successfully transmitted via four bonded channel.