H. Yoon and J.W. Kim: Collaborative Streaming-based Media Content Sharing in WiFi-enabled Home Networks
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Collaborative Streaming-based Media Content Sharing
in WiFi-enabled Home Networks
Hayoung Yoon, Student Member, IEEE and JongWon Kim, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract — In home networks, it has been challenging to
provide flexible and scalable media content sharing among
heterogeneous consumer electronic devices. Upcoming
industrial standard WiFi-Direct will prompt the popular
WiFi-equipped devices to establish instant ad-hoc peer-to-
peer (i.e., direct) connectivity. In this paper, we propose
DOMS (Decentralized cOllaborative Media content
Streaming) that realizes flexible media content sharing by
exploiting collaborative segment-based streaming amongst
WiFi devices via the temporarily-established direct links. We
implement the DOMS prototype devices with embedded
computing machines and verify its performance under several
realistic experimental configurations. The realized prototype
devices altogether show improved sharing performance by
supporting two-times more concurrent devices at target media
quality when compared with conventional non-collaborative
(i.e., client-server) streaming
1
.
Index Terms — Wireless home networking, WiFi-Direct,
direct link setup, multimedia contents distribution, and mobile
peer-to-peer straming.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently there has been a noticeable trend in wireless
communication industries that populates mobile devices (e.g.,
smart phones, handheld game consoles, personal media
players, and e-book readers) to be equipped with multiple
types of wireless networking interfaces including WiFi (i.e.,
IEEE 802.11-based wireless networking). By taking
advantage of upcoming industrial standard WiFi-Direct
(formally known as WiFi peer-to-peer) [1], the wireless
network connectivity is now extending to other home
appliances such as digital televisions, camcorders, and printers.
This new standard allows consumer electronics devices to
establish direct (i.e., instant ad-hoc peer-to-peer) connectivity
while sustaining the WiFi infrastructure-mode connection to
the Internet as well as the backward compatibility with already
deployed WiFi devices. Sooner or later, in home networks as
shown in Fig. 1, there will be diverse WiFi-equipped digital
devices producing, storing, manipulating, and sharing
multimedia contents. Within this wirelessly-connected home
network, downloaded IPTV video streams are recorded at the
local storage space of digital TV and then instantly shared
with other devices. Digital camcorders can upload the recoded
1
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea
(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (KRF-2008-313-D00682).
The authors are with the School of Information and Communications,
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Gwangju, Korea (e-
mail: {hyyoon,jongwon}@nm.gist.ac.kr).
video streams to either digital TV or other storage-capable
devices. Also, instant media sharing between mobile phones
can be made without requiring the help of WiFi access points
(APs).
Fig. 1. Various types of media content sharing amongst WiFi-Direct
enabled devices in a home network.
Most WiFi devices (hereinafter any reference to WiFi
device includes both conventional and WiFi-Direct terminals)
in the home network are heterogeneous in their computational
capability, networking bandwidth, power supply constraint,
and mobility mode. For example, a digital printer typically has
less computational power and networking bandwidth than a
tablet PC. Mobile hand-held devices such as smart phones and
digital camcorders may have a moderate computational power,
whereas they do not hold persistent wireless connectivity due
to user mobility.
A flexible media content sharing among these diverse
consumer media devices is one of the most interesting
applications in home networks [2]-[6]. As mentioned already,
the direct wireless links between WiFi devices are readily
available via WiFi-Direct. However, there exist several
challenges to realize flexible and scalable media content
sharing amongst WiFi devices. First, the data transfers
between WiFi devices may not be efficiently performed due to
inefficient link-layer associations among them under the
regulation of IEEE 802.11 MAC (medium access control) [7].
Contributed Paper
Manuscript received 08/25/10
Current version published 12/23/10
Electronic version published 12/30/10.
0098 3063/10/$20.00 © 2010 IEEE