Intelligent distributed multimedia collection: content aggregation and integration

People's multimedia content is spread around their home network and content services on the Internet, such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook. In this paper we present a system that aggregates all the multimedia content of the end user and integrates it into a unified collection for the user's convenience. The system provides location transparency of multimedia content, content filtering on player compatibility and metadata completion to aid in improved usability. This effectively enables the user to rediscover his multimedia collection without any technical knowledge. A proof-of-concept implementation known as Intelligent Distributed Multimedia Collection (IDMC) has been made that is able to detect and browse UPnP MediaServer devices as well as collect information from YouTube. This implementation also contains a media player and is able to control UPnP MediaRenderer devices remotely. Furthermore, performance has been measured to assess different ways of iterating through a multimedia collection

DYAMAND: dynamic, adaptive management of networks and devices

Consumer devices increasingly are "smart" and hence offer services that can interwork with and/or be controlled by others. However, the full exploitation of the inherent opportunities this offers, is hurdled by a number of potential limitations. First of all, the interface towards the device might be vendor and even device specific, implying that extra effort is needed to support a specific device. Standardization efforts try to avoid this problem, but within a certain standard ecosystem the level of interoperability can vary (i.e. devices carrying the same standard logo are not necessarily interoperable). Secondly, different application domains (e.g. multimedia vs. energy management) today have their own standards, thus limiting trans-sector innovation because of the additional effort required to integrate devices from traditionally different domains into novel applications. In this paper, we discuss the basic components of current so-called service discovery protocols (SDPs) and present our DYAMAND (DYnamic, Adaptive MAnagement of Networks and Devices) framework. We position this framework as a middleware layer between applications and discoverable/controllable devices, and hence aim to provide the necessary tool to overcome the (intra- and inter-domain) interoperability gaps previously sketched. Thus, we believe it can act as a catalyst enabling trans-sector innovation

Integrating personal media and digital TV with QoS guarantees using virtualized set-top boxes: architecture and performance measurements

Nowadays, users consume a lot of functionality in their home coming from a service provider located in the Internet. While the home network is typically shielded off as much as possible from the `outside world', the supplied services could be greatly extended if it was possible to use local information. In this article, an extended service is presented that integrates the user's multimedia content, scattered over multiple devices in the home network, into the Electronic Program Guide (EPG) of the Digital TV. We propose to virtualize the set-top box, by migrating all functionality except user interfacing to the service provider infrastructure. The media in the home network is discovered through standard Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), of which the QoS functionality is exploited to ensure high quality playback over the home network, that basically is out of the control of the service provider. The performance of the subsystems are analysed

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

Automatic fine-grained area detection for thin client systems

A

Design of a management infrastructure for smart grid pilot data processing and analysis

Future smart grids will combine power grid technologies with information and communication technologies to enable a more efficient, reliable and sustainable energy production and distribution. To realize such a smart grid, large scale pilot projects are currently implemented and evaluated. Such pilot projects generate an excessive amount of data that needs to be processed: energy measurements, information on available flexibility from smart devices that can be shifted in time, control signals, dynamic prices, environmental data, etc. To validate and analyze the gathered data and adjust the running experiments in real-time, an optimized data management infrastructure is needed as well as comprehensive visualization tools. In this paper we present a data management infrastructure optimized for the follow up of the large scale smart grid project called Linear. In this project a pilot in over 200 households is implemented to evaluate several business cases including the balancing of renewable energy supply and the mitigation of voltage and power issues in distribution grids. By decoupling the gathering of the incoming data, the processing and storage of the data, and the data visualization and analysis on different servers, each with their own, optimized database, we obtain an efficient system for validation of the generated data in the pilot, management of the deployed set-ups and follow-up of the ongoing experiments in real-time

OMUS : an optimized multimedia service for the home environment

Media content in home environments is often scattered across multiple devices in the home network. As both the available multimedia devices in the home (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops, game consoles, etc.) and the available content (video and audio) is increasing, interconnecting desired content with available devices is becoming harder and home users are experiencing difficulties in selecting interesting content for their current context. In this paper, we start with an analysis of the home environment by means of a user study. Information handling problems are identified and requirements for a home information system formulated. To meet these requirements we propose the OMUS home information system which includes an optimized content aggregation framework, a hybrid group-based contextual recommender system, and an overall web-based user interface making both content and recommendations available for all devices across the home network. For the group recommendations we introduced distinct weights for each user and showed that by varying the weights, the coverage (i.e., items that can be returned by the recommender) considerably increases. Also the addition of genre filter functionality was proven to further boost the coverage. The OMUS system was evaluated by means of focus groups and by qualitative and quantitative performance assessment of individual parts of the system. The modularity of internal components and limited imposed hardware requirements implies flexibility as to how the OMUS system can be deployed (ranging from e.g., embedded in hardware devices or more software services based)

Bandwidth Reservations in Home Networks:Performance Assessment of UPnP-QoS V3.

In order for service providers to provide their users high quality services in the home network, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning is needed to protect premium services. In this paper, we describe how a Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP) based home network architecture solves this problem in a heterogeneous home network. We outline how it both relieves the end user from troublesome configuration and still offers control to the service provider. We particularly present performance assessment results for UPnP-QoS v3, based on a fully operational experimental implementation. The quantitative measurement results are further used in extensive simulations demonstrating acceptable response times and clear QoS admission differentiation

Trust as differentiator for value-adding home service providers

The openness of OSGi home service delivery platforms enables a service provider to deploy new services which aggregate services from other providers. Without security measures, each service provider is able to probe the home network, modify the configurations of other services, and (ab)use these services in favor of their own services. Premium service providers however prefer to protect their value-added services in an attempt to differentiate with low-cost or free Internet-based service providers. The common home technologies however lack fine-grained security support and do not allow to configure trust-based service adaptation. In this paper, we propose an intelligent residential gateway, with three security components that facilitate trust-based service adaptation in a multi provider environment. Using XACML policies, the collaboration between service components can remotely be modified. Legacy services can be protected and collaboration of services can be made dependent on the outcome of any other service. We compare OSGi virtualisation, embedded OSGi security and security-as-a-service. The latter allows for fine-grained access control on method-level. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we evaluate the performance overhead of transparent service authentication and three policy administration approaches. The results illustrate a minimal overhead to add trust-based service collaboration to any (legacy) service