Using SDR for Cost-Effective DTV Applications

Today’s digital TVs can provide advanced functionalities such as DVR, EPG, and PIP. They require simultaneous access to multiple channels using additional hardware resources, which increases the cost. In order to solve this problem, we propose to use wideband software defined radio (SDR) that can demodulate multiple channels on a single radio frontend. Through the SDR, we can obtain multiple channels from a single wideband using frequency translation and FIR filter. Specifically, we use only one radio frontend and obtain multiple MPEG-TSs. Through this approach, digital TV applications can be dynamically and flexibly added to or deleted from smart TVs without incurring hardware cost. We demonstrate a prototype built on USRP and GNU Radio that works on real broadcasting streams.