Seamless Streaming Transfer Method between Devices within Mobile Personal Area Networks

Abstract

Since the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been chosen by the Next Generation Network (NGN) as its standard for establishing sessions in the Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a complementary architecture based on SIP and its exten- sions would provide a tremendous opportunities for future ubiq- uitous multimedia communications. However, SIP-based end-to- end approaches require negotiation between parties, even though the transfer destination device has the same capabilities and is physically nearby. This paper addresses a delay in streaming control between networked media devices in home networks. We assume that cellular phones would act as control points (CPs) for virtual devices, and have called these networks mobile Personal Area Networks (mPANs). The architecture is based on combining the indirect approach with the SIP approach. CP can control input/output (I/O) devices for audio/video streamings within mPAN individually. With switching from end-to-end to indirection with a home gateway, the unnecessary renegotiation between parties are cut. We also added an extra handover header to reduce the delay in retrieving streaming from a device to the CP. From the experimental results, the mPAN-supported SIP User Agent (UA) dramatically reduced the transfer time between devices and the retrieval time from device to CP compared with non-supported SIP UA. Index Terms—media streaming transfer, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), mobile personal area networks, Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) I. INTRODUCTION The appearance of dual-mode cellular/Wireless LAN (WLAN) mobile phones provides the potential for new IP- based multimedia communications in collaboration with long- range and short-range wireless networks. While mobile phones are improving with more enhanced capabilities for IP-based multimedia communications, they remain limited in terms of bandwidth, display size, audio quality, and computational power. At the same time, recent consumer electronics have been media devices networked through the broadband Internet access service, and they have much greater capabilities than mobile phones. Combining the advantages of both into a single virtual device complements the capabilities of mobile phones and provides seamless interaction between consumer electronics, mobile phones, and PC devices. This paper addresses a seamless streaming transfer archi- tecture to control networked media devices in home networks based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) (1) and a delay in streaming control between networked media devices in the networks. We assumed that mobile phones would act as control points for aligned devices, and called these networks mobile Personal Area Networks (mPANs). Users can then seamlessly control input/output (I/O) devices in networked media devices within mPANs. Since the SIP has been chosen by the Next Generation Network (NGN) as its standard for establishing sessions in the Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and it is being deployed in hardware and software IP multimedia clients, a comple- mentary architecture based on SIP and its extensions would provide a tremendous opportunities for future ubiquitous fixed mobile convergence (FMC) multimedia communications. With wide acceptance of Voice over IP (VoIP) and expectation for rapid adoption of multimedia mobile services, the signaling efficiency in IMS has become increasingly important. Users not only expect high voice and video quality, but also high availability, speed and reliability in service invocation and execution. Motivated by the importance of signaling efficiency for SIP-based system, in this paper we propose an architecture for mPAN that is based on combining the indirect approach with the SIP approach. With the hybrid architecture, user can control I/O devices for audio/video streamings within mPAN individually, as well as the transfer time between devices and the retrieval time from device to mobile phone are reduced. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II outlines related work. In Section III, we describe the features of mPAN in more detail and seamless streaming control architecture using SIP. Section IV provides the results obtained from evaluating the prototype testbed. Section V ends the paper with a brief summary and some concluding remarks.