STEER: D2.2 STEER requirements and experimental environment architecture

Abstract

STEER develops around the concept of innovative social and network-aware media distribution architecture that:*coordinates the effective sharing of media and networking resources among participating users, ensuring scalability, stability and network friendliness,*exploits features and capabilities of modern home gateways, such as caching and transcoding, to limit the cost of media distribution through resource sharing, dynamically adapting media exchanges to the capacity of the underlying networks, reducing service discontinuities and improving the overall Quality of Experience of the customer, and*makes the best usage of information about media object geographic location, social relationships and media object dynamics (e.g., popularity changes) to offer an efficient and personalized social-aware search and recommendation functionality.This document provides a detailed view of the STEER architecture, through the definition of its functional components, their purpose, mutual interactions and the applications that the project plans to develop with them.The document is organized as follows:*Section 1 delineates the structure of the document and the underlying rationale*Section 2 analyses the objectives that the STEER architectures tries to fulfil, expressed as system-level requirements affecting end users behaviour, user devices, home gateways, involved service providers, and STEER applications*Section 3 shows how STEER provides a way of organizing the wide range of raw information collected across various social media networks into a number of complementary, structured databases (or ‘graphs’) whose manipulation allows to achieve a deeper insight of the mutual relationships among user, events and data aggregates. This in turn sets the foundations for optimizing features such as recommendation, caching and media distribution.*Section 4 introduces a short but holistic view of the STEER architectural components and their main interactions*Section 5 describes the STEER components in more detail, explaining their purpose, their functionalities and the research objectives that motivate their usage, with relationship to the requirements set in Section 2.*Section 6 and Section 7 describe how specific STEER components are exploited to implement the STEER Augmented Live Broadcast and Storytelling applications, respectively, and the way they address the use cases described in Deliverable D2.1. The user interfaces for both applications has been defined in Deliverable D2.3