Interoperability enhancement for cable host navigation

The national standard of digital cable broadcasting in Korea as well as in North America has its root from the OpenCable and OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). However, OCAP may have interoperability problems when an OpenCable-certified host is moved to a different service area where extended Application Programming Interfaces (API) not defined in the standard are used or code version management is not properly done between System Operators (SOs). Such abnormal cases can be easily found in practical business environments such as in merge and acquisition of SOs. Hosts used in two different SOs may use two incompatible OCAPs. In this paper, a new method is proposed to allow hosts to navigate in different SOs by modifying the Code Version Table (CVT) defined in the Common Download (CD) specification in OpenCable. Also, in this paper, actual validation of the idea using the modified CVT is included through several field tests.