A model for the delivery of interactive applications over broadcast channels

A good way to deliver video and multimedia services to mobile terminals is to broadcast them. But, methods to broadcast interactive applications are very crude. In current broadcasting systems, the available bandwidth for interactive applications is and will remain heavily constrained by the associated video and audio streams. To overcome these constraints, traditional techniques rely on carrousels to deliver the application in fragments, with some implied latency. The application starts when the base fragments have been received and the whole application is available when all the fragments have been delivered. It is crucial for broadcasters to control how an application is fragmented. Such fragmentation is in general made by hand, specifically for each application and differently for each broadcast technology. In this paper, we analyzed some typical interactive applications and derive a model, close to the application level, that can drive the broadcasting of the application independently from the type of application and from the broadcast technology. We also present a piece of software developed based on this model that validates the concepts on some applications.