Senior Project - HITV

The purpose of this project was to determine the issues involved in the design and implementation of an "end-to-end" interactive TV system using Berkeley UNIX socket libraries for the networking modules, and with as much hardware independence as possible. This project lead to the definition of abstract interfaces (APIs), the specification of the network protocols to be used, and an understanding of the issues involved in video streaming using the MPEG standard. Since performance has a large impact on the usability of interactive systems, the project detailed the performance issues and suggested mitigation strategies for software elements exhibiting the greatest latency. The software, consisting of a distributed set of cooperating processes, was implemented in C. While the initial target was interactive video, the result was a generic architecture which allowed for the provision of arbitrary interactive services.