Digital Living Network Alliance Research Articles

A Quality Based Power-Hump Mechanism for High Speed Network Connectivity of Mobile Devices in Digital Living Network Alliance Networks

Mobile devices are increasingly assuming an important role in “smart home” network environments. Although their computing, storage and networking capabilities have evolved significantly, these devices remain power-constrained and, therefore, there is need to actively take measures to minimize their power consumption. In this paper, we propose a Power Saving (PS) mechanism for mobile devices in Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) home networks, which allows them to conserve power without compromising their higher-layer functionality. The proposed mechanism introduces a level of indirection that abstracts the low-level low-power support of different wireless bearers and exposes a uniform interface to higher-layer entities, such as applications and Universal–Plugand-Play (UPP) agents. We define four abstract NC-PS modes and describe their mapping in the case of Bluetooth, a common wireless bearer for mobile devices, now supported in DLNA. Battery power is an important resource in Ad-hoc networks. It has been observed that in Ad-hoc networks, routing control messages and data transmission, these timers are set and refreshed on-demand. Nodes that are not involved in energy consumption do not reflect the communication activities in the network.

PUCC Activities on Overlay Networking Protocols and Metadata for Controlling and Managing Home Networks and Appliances

Many researches and standardizations have been done for controlling and managing home networks and appliances during past ten years. Such activities and technologies include the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)/Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), the Energy Conservation and Homecare Network (ECHONET), and the Continua Health Alliance. Such technologies control and manage specific home appliances. However, there have been no technologies and standards for controlling and managing heterogeneous home appliances in a consolidated manner. In addition, there are no standards that fully define technologies for controlling and managing home appliances outside home from mobile phones and cloud servers. In addition to the Internet, new networks such as home networks and sensor networks are emerging. Overlay networking is one of the most suitable technologies for communications among home appliances, home gateways (HGWs), mobile phones, and cloud servers over such heterogeneous networks. Metadata is also an important technology for describing various home appliances in a consistent manner. We have designed overlay networking protocols and metadata for controlling and managing heterogeneous home appliances. Peer-to-Peer Universal Computing Consortium (PUCC) was established to deploy our overlay networking and metadata technologies toward de facto standardization. We explain PUCC overlay networking technologies, and their application to home appliances control from a mobile phone, and describe PUCC activities.

Design of Network Architecture Using Mobile Gateways for DLNA Devices in Wide Area Networks

The prevalence of information appliances supporting DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) such as televisions, recorders, and mobile phones has made it possible to share digital contents (e.g. videos, music and pictures) among appliances connected to a local network. However, DLNA does not let you share contents over different networks via the Internet. In this paper, we propose a network architecture where we adopt our SOAP method to mobile devices and use them as mobile gateways to consume digital contents from remote networks. We also confirm its practicality with a prototype.

무선 애드 혹 환경에서의 UPnP의 SSDP 기능 향상을 위한 서비스 발견 및 광고 기법

UPnP(Universal Plug and Play) is a middleware of DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) services a home network. UPnP supports the connections between each other devices in networks and also provides service discovery and advertisement with SSDP(Simple Service Discovery Protocol), which is generally designed for wired networks. SSDP operates on multicasting discovery request and advertisement and unicasting a reply in networks. It is a challenge issue for service discovery protocol such as SSDP to provide a stable and effective service in wireless ad-hoc networks. Wired based service discovery protocol does not consider the dynamics of wireless ad-hoc network. In that case, the nodes are freely in or out. Therefore, this paper proposes a flexible SSDP(fSSDP) which is a peer-to-peer(P2P) discovery protocol adopted for wireless ad-hoc Networks. It is implemented on the extension of SSDP. fSSDP supports a functionality that the broadcast area of service discovery dynamically changes with the periodically updated area of advertisement. It is good for reducing messaging overhead caused from the broadcast flooding of service discovery in wireless ad-hoc network.

Managing a media server content directory in absence of reliable metadata

Content metadata play an important role assisting users to find and access content items of interest. In general, explicit metadata created commercially for traditional media distribution such as TV and packaged content work adequately. However with the proliferation of Internet usage, networked devices, and tools to create, edit, re-distribute, and manage diverse content items, the problem of maintaining reliable metadata in directory services of media servers is very complex. In this paper we analyze existing metadata frameworks used by industry consortia, specifically UPnP (universal plug and play) and DLNA (digital living network alliance) and discuss fundamental problems that cause content directories to be populated with unreliable metadata. We propose alternative methods based on implicit metadata and user-generated tagging that improve availability of reliable metadata.

Design and Implementation of the DLNA Family Intercom System for Smart Homes

In a traditional intercom system that only allows place-to-place communication in a house, it is necessary to dial the extension number of a specific family member, or dial each extension number individually via the intercom broadcasting, in order to reach the desired person. Additional master stations controlled the intercom system are required, and it is load to maintain the stations for general users. In order to solve these problems, we propose the digital living network alliance (DLNA) compatible family intercom system (DFIS): the architecture to support user mobility. This architecture makes it possible to quickly reach a family member without the knowledge of the extension number that caters to a fixed location. In other words, it will be not necessary to dial the extension number of the location of the desired person. We introduce call control and phone handling under the subject of DFIS architecture and demonstrate that the proposed DLNA family intercom device and DLNA family intercom adaptor can work well.

Networked device capability and content media format matching scheme for multimedia access

This paper presents a scheme to dynamically match capabilities of content sinks and media formats of items supplied by content sources to improve interoperability among a wide range of networked CE devices. The scheme proposes the use of transcoders located in external networks (e.g. Internet) when a match is not found locally. Here "media format" refers to the combination of content encoding format and packaging or transport method used to make available the content item on the network. Existing capability matching methods rely on standard repositories agreed a priori such as MIME (multipurpose Internet mail extensions) media types, and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) media format profiles. The proposed scheme based on external transcoders enables support of profiles based on newly invented formats or new combinations of existing formats and packaging or transport methods. This extensible approach makes possible rendering of content items available in media profiles unknown to the renderer. Our capability matching scheme improves media interoperability when compared with existing methods.

Robust HD Video Stream Transmission for Wireless DTV

In this paper the authors describe a clock synchronization system with buffer management mechanism that enables "TV adaptable quality" of HD (high definition) video transmission via wireless network. Like DLNA (digital living network alliance), the usage of IP based network for CE devices, especially for audio video appliance, is increasing its importance. Compared with IT technology based devices such as a PC, consumers expect CE devices to provide more stable functions and higher quality. CE devices are expected to provide audio visual contents including HD video contents with the quality better than that can be achieved with Internet streaming on a PC. Based on well considered simulation for wireless network usage at home, we have developed the buffering system with its optimized size that can offer high quality HD video transmission service to CE oriented customers.

IEEE1394 기반 AV 콘텐츠 공유를 위한 DLNA DMS 설계 및 구현

홈 네트워크 기술의 발달로 가전기기와 정보기기의 제어 및 관리를 위한 홈 네트워크 미들웨어 기술에 대한 중요성이 확대되고 있다. 또한 AV(Audio Video) 기기의 발전과 영상 콘텐츠의 급속한 보급으로 인해 AV 전송을 위한 IEEE1394의 사용이 증가되고 있다. 그러나 홈 네트워크 미들웨어 표준인 DLNA(Digital Living Network Alliance)에서는 IEEE1394를 통한 AV 데이터 전송에 대한 고려가 미흡하다. 본 논문에서는 DLNA를 통해 EEE1394 상에서 AV 콘텐츠를 공유할 때 발생하는 문제점을 설명하고, 이를 해결하기 위한 AV 콘텐츠의 전송과 공유 방법을 제안한다. 또한 본 논문에서 제안한 기법의 DLNA 호환성 검증을 통하여, 댁내에서 가전기기 및 정보기기의 제조사 및 전송매체에 구애받지 않는 AV 콘텐츠 공유가 가능함을 보인다. With the progress of home network technologies, the importance of the home network middleware for control and management of the digital appliances is increasing. Furthermore, by the technological growth of the AV equipments and the popularization of video contents, IEEE1394 for the transmission of AV data has spread fast. However, DLNA(Digital Living Network Alliance), which is a standard of the home network middleware, does not consider the transmission of AV data over IEEE1394. In this paper, we describe the problem occurring when the AV contents are transmitted over IEEE1394 in DLNA and propose the scheme for transmission of AV contents over IEEE1394. In addition, by the verification test of DLNA compatibility, we show that our proposed scheme can provide the share of AV contents without regard to the manufactures and transmission media.