A wireless billboard channel over digital video broadcasting-handheld platform

Wireless Billboard Channels (WBCs) are a proposal for novel broadcast advertisement channel which will be integral to realising the Consumer-centric Business Model (CBM) within the new emerging Ubiquitous Consumer Wireless World (UCWW), their primary goal of facilitating the service of Advertisement, Discovery and Association (ADA) of wireless access networks and teleservices in the UCWW. In the principal research presented in this thesis the author has investigated the conceptualisation, design, implementation and testing of a WBC established over a Digital Video Broadcasting – Handheld (DVB-H) platform. The thesis addresses how realising this goal the following objectives were successfully achieved in the research work and are described in the thesis:  The creation of a foundational WBC infrastructure.  The elaboration of a WBC framework, interface and protocol architecture.  The development of a fully operational WBC system prototype.  The investigation and implementation of suitable WBC carrier technologies.　 The WBC system proposed and designed has been developed along three architectural layers – physical, link and service layers. In designing the service layer, to achieve an extensible, flexible, configurable and maintainable system, the WBC Service Provider (WBC-SP) and Mobile User (MU)’s software architecture has been proposed. A number of intelligent algorithms have been developed for advertisement’s collecting, clustering, scheduling, indexing, discovery and association in Multi-Agents System (MAS) environment. A new WBC Advertisements Delivery Protocol (ADP) has been designed and developed for delivering advertisement over unidirectional WBCs to MU simultaneously. In the link layer, and specifically dictated by DVB-H link layer conditions, a novel cross-layer Multi-Protocol Encapsulation - Forward Error Correction (MPE-FEC) coding and decoding schemes were proposed for improving reliability. Realising the DVB-H physical layer was achieved through a specially constructed laboratory testbed infrastructure, using a DVB-H physical layer simulator. Besides the design and implementation of this layered, distributed, intelligent, and heterogeneous WBCs system, the research work included the proofing and refining of aspects of the designs. Also carried out was the operational testing, performance evaluation and scalability evaluation of the core WBCs elements. WBC carrier technologies other than DVB-H were also explored, e.g. Terrestrial- Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB). The work has yielded over 20 internationally published research papers to date, including one in the IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics and two in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking.