# Hardware Update through Digital TV Signals
## 7 Conclusions  
This work presents a new approach for hardware reconfiguration, which is intended to be used in DTV environments. HARD allows receivers to be automatically reconfigured, providing a strategy to create new device structures. Additionally, receiver architectures could be focused on hardware upgrades in numerous ways.  
The results obtained with the present experiments show that commercial systems can reconfigure distinct core modules in a DTV system. Additionally, the proposed reconfiguration scheme can work in parallel with other DTV tasks. Indeed, the obtained remounting times are satisfactory, considering embedded systems with low processing power, and the reconfiguration ones can be improved if FPGAs are integrated into the receiver boards.  
Additionally, the chosen examples are simple enough to allow fast implementation and easy multiplexing, and they are complex enough in such a way that the complete hardware update chain is used to reveal its complexity and show its validity.  
Critical tasks generally performed by an ASIC device, such as H.264 video decoding and cryptography tasks, could be designed for FPGA devices based on the present scheme. It would enable the incorporation of technological advances, such as new video compression schemes, which would create a flexible DTV network. Furthermore, other devices that use transport streams could also use HARD to design intelligent architectures and flexible, low-cost devices.  
It is worth noticing that the overhead presented by the proposed methodology is mostly affected by the pre-synthesized file format. Universal formats, such as SVF, include more information in their file headers, which increases the final file sizes. Consequently,many private sections would be needed, and the remounting process at the receivers would be slower. It is necessary to parse reconfiguration files and extract the SVF syntax, which is performed before the reconfiguration process and increases the system overhead. The associated file overhead could be reduced by using proprietary or dedicated reconfiguration schemes; however, the universal behavior of such a scheme would be lost.  
Finally, our methodology does not tackle security, as we expect that trusted elements (i.e., broadcasters) send reconfiguration data. Indeed, when dealing with middlewares, their authorization and general data specifically seem reliable and guide the resulting reception procedure. In addition, tampering with or attacking DTV signals (transport streams) is not a usual practice.  
Conceptualization, R.R.d.O. and V.F.d.L.J.; methodology, R.R.d.O. and V.F.d.L.J.; software, R.R.d.O. and F.A.S.G.; validation, L.C.C., E.B.d.L.F. and V.F.d.L.J.; investigation, R.R.d.O. and V.F.d.L.J.; resources, V.F.d.L.J.; data curation, M.M.d.L. and F.A.S.G.; writing--original draft preparation, R.R.d.O. and V.F.d.L.J.; writing--review and editing, F.A.S.G., M.M.d.L., E.B.d.L.F. and L.C.C.; visualization, M.M.d.L.; supervision, V.F.d.L.J.; project administration, V.F.d.L.J.; funding acquisition, V.F.d.L.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by CNPq, CAPES, FAPEAM, and Samsung.  
Not applicable.  
Data Availability StatementData is stored on the PPGEE database and may be made available upon request.  
This research, in accordance with Article 48 of Decree n\({}^{\circ}\) 6.008/2006, was funded by Samsung Electronics of Amazonia Ltd.a under the terms of Federal Law n\({}^{\circ}\) 8.387/1991 and through agreement n\({}^{\circ}\) 004, signed with CETELI/UFAM. We also would like to acknowledge the financial support from CAPES, CNPq, and FAPEAM.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.