Interactive Set-top Box : Software Integration and Validation

Abstract

In recent years with advent of digital era, technologies like Digital Television, Internet, Local Area Network, IP telephony have evolved the concept of Digital Home. Interactive set-top box, also called Headed Gateway fulfils need of residential gateway, digital set-top box and telephony as a Complete Solution. Here in this thesis such a Home gateway system is presented which has residential gateway with IP telephony as Front End and Digital set-top box as Back End. Gateway is cable modem based device (Euro-DOCSIS) which is dual CPU architecture, Cable modem and ARM core. Digital set-top box has all audio/video decoding capabilities. Both are self-sufficient and independent enough. This whole system has Linux based operating system with kernel 3.10. This thesis includes integration and full software system validation of Interactive Set-top box (ISTB). Integration over here means to unite together various software components along with kernel, with valid release and build complete software of ISTB. Full system software validation is process of being assured that product is meeting specified requirements. Thus ISTB software validation means to check functionalities like Linear TV use case, Local Media Playback, Data Browsing, etc. Sanity testing is a type of software validation process which is performed after verification of software and assures previous bugs are resolved and working functionality is not broken. Software integration of ISTB is similar to sanity testing where software components with new releases are integrated and get surity of solution of previous limitations. Full system validation is post sanity process where when a full system performance is validated with all specified requirements i.e. use cases related to ISTB. ISTB use cases are classifies as: • Functional • Parallel • Stress • Robustness

Full system software validation is burdensome, time consuming and more prone to human error. Automation of such testing using Python and XML language makes validation process efficient and less complex.