A Lightweight Software Design for Seamless Home Multimedia Services

Abstract

People now possess various home-networked devices that are capable of upgraded computing, extensible storage, multimedia processing, and network connectivity functions. With broadband home networking technologies, such devices can perform media content distribution in a home network and play shared media files in a n etworked fashion. When users with portable home- networked devices are free to move in residential areas, they can cause the so-called playing discontinuity problem because device movement can tear down any ongoing network connections for data transferring and then terminate any ongoing media playing services in home networks. To contend with this problem, this paper proposes a software architecture for seamless home multimedia services in ubiquitous home computing environments. This architecture design contains three functional components, including network connection, media transfer, and media playing functionalities, all of which are designed on the base of standard Internet protocol suites. As a result of a lightweight software design, the propos ed architecture is platform-independent and can be activated inside an application-level execution context. Home-networked devices can incorporate this application-level software without need to modify underlying hardware configurations, system kernel modules , and operating systems. Prototype development implements the software packages and applications, which are able to keep ongoing media playing services from playing discontinuity and interruption when home-networked devices move in an administrative network domain. Scenario demonstration shows that the proposed software architecture is able to provide seamless home multimedia services with better user experience for multimedia entertainment in residential environments.