A component interconnection model for interactive digital television systems

Distributed multimedia systems should deal with critical issues such as temporal requirements of audio and video. Such requirements can become more complex when applications are executed in interactive digital television systems, since there is a diversity of hardware devices, operating systems and communication technologies. In order to fulfil the requirements of such applications, their constituting components need to interact with each other, as well to consider QoS issues related to devices and transmission media. This paper presents a generic interconnection model that allows communication between components in heterogeneous and distributed multimedia environments. Besides, the model supports adaptation in the middleware layer, triggered by QoS and user requirements changes.