Dynamic broadcast

The field of Consumer TV has developed rapidly in the last years. The new user terminals (TV set and Set-top-box) are increasingly equipped with multiple network connection interfaces (broadcast, WiFi, USB etc.) as well as built-in storage. In this paper, we utilized these features to optimize the operation of broadcast networks and to make the use of the valuable broadcast spectrum more efficient. We developed the architecture of the dynamic broadcast system, in which the TV content can be flexibly transmitted via both broadcast and broadband networks, in both real-time and non-real-time fashion, and the transmission parameters in the broadcast network can also be modified dynamically. To examine the benefits that the proposed techniques can provide we simulated the content delivery scheduling with realistic TV program data and transmission cost models. The scheduling problem was solved using integer linear programming and our findings showed that dynamic broadcast can reduce the TV programs´ delivery cost and increase the efficiency of spectrum usage at the same time. The freed data rate/spectrum can be utilized to deliver more services, or to adjust the broadcast network settings to reduce power consumption, or even be leased to secondary wireless communication networks. A possible architecture of a dynamic broadcast user terminal is also presented in this paper.