For here or to go? Downloading music on the move with an ultra reliable wireless Internet application

Abstract

The maturing distributed file sharing technology implemented by Napster has first enabled the dissemination of musical content in digital form, permitting to customers to retrieve stored music files from around the world. In the post-Napster era, the Apple iTunes online music service has hit a record share of 16.7% in the MP3 player market [J. Mc Hugh, Why Wi-Fi is a good business? Wired (2003) 25–26]. This is only the most prominent example of the success of digital music distribution based on packet network technologies. However, to the best of our knowledge, the most noteworthy aspect of the success of digital music distribution is that little about this music delivery technology is really new. To drastically change the nature of this business, we claim that wireless delivery technology must come into the picture. This way, the digital music delivery model will benefit from the integration of the wired Internet with a broad gamut of wireless access technologies, such as WiFi, WPAN and 3G. In this paper we address the problem of the “customer on the move”; we present a wireless Internet application designed to support the distribution of digital music to handheld devices. The main novelty of our software is the ability to provide a seamless music delivery service even in the presence of handoffs within the same radio medium (horizontal) and across media (vertical). Actual measurements from a deployed application show that our system can deliver a smooth, ultra reliable, low latency music service to mobile users.