Reliability of Pervasive Display Management

In this modern world, as people continue to become increasingly mobile, there is an increased need for dissemination of information through ubiquitous displays. Ever decreasing prices of electronics, availability of tools for easy content creation, advent of advanced browsers and improved networks together enabled digital signage to take over from traditional printed or painted signage. The necessity and use of digital displays in various fields today have made them truly ubiquitous in nature. This rapid growth of displays also meant that the reliability requirements have become stricter. In the world of digital displays that update in real time, errors or failures to display content are directly visible to the user and hence will have big impact. For example, imagine a display failure in an airport and the chaos it creates among passengers. Hence, reliability in operation through continuous monitoring and quick recovery from a disaster are essential requirements of digital signage systems. In this thesis, we discuss the evolution of digital displays, their unique features and some of their many applications. We then study the architectural aspects, standard requirements and general limitations of display management system. As a case study, we then study the functional features of ‘Concerto - digital signage’, a free and open source software (FOSS) application, and evaluate it against the standard requirements of digital signage software. As part of this thesis, we also extend the case study application, built on the Ruby on Rails framework, to overcome some of the limitations like remote monitoring capabilities and capturing meaningful analytics by integrating with Google analytics. Finally, the thesis concludes with listing of feasible enhancements to the case study implementation