TVGrid: A Grid Architecture to use the idle resources on a Digital TV network

Abstract

Systems such as SETI@home [8] have proven that it is possible to make good use of massive amounts of communication and computing power that would otherwise be wasted in the leaves of the Internet. In this paper we explore this idea in a different setting. We present the TVGrid architecture, which brings parallel application execution to the digital TV domain, by using the idle communication and processing capacity of a digital TV network. In the proposed architecture, a TV station runs a scheduler that uses unused bandwidth in the digital TV broadcast channel to send tasks to digital TV receivers, which may run them using their unused capacity. Task's outputs are later sent back to the TV station through a return channel (a broadband Internet connection, for example). TV Grid architecture was developed during the studies of the Brazilian Digital TV project.