Digital Video Multicasting System with Seamless Handover Mechanism

Digital television (TV) has officially entered the handheld application areas since the infrastructure of communications have improved. Most PDAs are equipped with built-in wireless local area network (WLAN). It thus become promising to provide multimedia services to mobile devices if multimedia streams can be transmitted to handheld mobile devices such as PDAs via low-cost WLAN architecture. The goal of this work is to propose seamless handover architecture to support multi-channel and non- interrupted broadcasting of TV programs in an environment with WLAN and handheld devices. Due to the characteristics of WLAN, our proposed architecture is most suitable to be used in the indoor environment.