Abstract
In digital TV broadcasting, such as terrestrial, cable, satellite, and IPTV, the head-end of digital TV broadcasting has a more complicated transmission structure than that of analog TV broadcasting. Furthermore, digital TV broadcasting has a feature that supports multiplex models, such as Multiple Program Transport Stream (MPTS). Therefore, the purpose of our work was to design and examine a more efficient new system of emergency alert message transmission to support the digital TV broadcasting environments. Digital TV broadcasting is the IP generation or RF transmission of 8-VSB, QAM, and QPSK modulated through a multiplexer or re-multiplexer multiplexed stream as a MPEG-2 Transport Stream after content encoding. The new system proposed in this paper transmits an emergency alert message without scrambling after replacing the PID and payload of the -packet with the message prototype in the TS stream from the multiplexer. If we need to transmit an emergency alert message under digital TV broadcasting services, then the receiver first checks the PID of each packet in the TS stream for the emergency alert message. Next, if a packet is determined to be an emergency alert message, then the set-top box displays the message on the TV screen using its function of On Screen Display, or the PC based software displays the message on the monitor screen using its function of overlay with user interface if the packet is found to be an emergency alert message. We have designed an emergency alert message protocol and a system model. By experiments and analysis of the system, we concluded that the system achieved efficiency and the ability to send and receive emergency alert messages using the system under different digital TV broadcasting service environments.