Without such protocols, every service delivered to the home would require its own interface to receive it. Open protocols would allow set top boxes, PCs or other information appliances to access multiple services from multiple service providers. DSM-CC is transport layer independent. In this way any application written to use DSM-CC need not concern itself with the underlying transport layer the application will use between the Server and the Client. This article gives a synopsis of each of the protocol areas, after the following section introduces the basic reference model around which DSM-CC is built.
Clients are, in general, devices such as set top boxes that consume multi-media content.
Servers are entities that provide multi-media content and services. A Server may be a distributed system and contain multiple computing platforms, some functionally specialized e.g. video pumps to provide video on demand service. A Server thus may have multiple transport connection points to the Network. The definition of a Network is very broad, it is any collection of communicating elements that provides connections for Users. The SRM is the entity that terminates the U-N connection from a User.