Context-Aware UPnP-AV Services for Adaptive Home Multimedia Systems

Abstract

Recommended by Harald KoschOne possibility to provide mobile multimedia in domestic multimedia systems is the use of Universal Plug and Play Audio Visual (UPnP-AV) devices. In a standard UPnP-AV scenario, multimedia content provided by a Media Server device is streamed to Media Renderer devices by the initiation of a Control Point. However, there is no provisioning of context-aware multimedia content customization. This paper presents an enhancement of standard UPnP-AV services for home multimedia environments regarding context awareness. It comes up with context profile definitions, shows how this context information can be queried from the Media Renderers, and illustrates how a Control Point can use this information to tailor a media stream from the Media Server to one or more Media Renderers. Moreover, since a standard Control Point implementation only queries one Media Server at a time, there is no global view on the content of all Media Servers in the UPnP-AV network. This paper also presents an approach of multimedia content integration on the Media Server side that provides fast search for content on the network. Finally, a number of performance measurements show the overhead costs of our enhancements to UPnP-AV in order to achieve the benefits.

Towards a Generic Context Model for BPM

“…There are many approaches that deal with context awareness in several areas, such as service engineering [14], [19], communications [6], [32], ubiquitous computing [34], multimedia [17] and business process engineering [5], [7], [40]. Several definitions of context have been proposed, however, there is no real consensus on the definition of this concept since it is used in many research fields.…”

“…Each triplet is an oriented arc labeled with the predicate, where the source node is the subject and the destination node is the object. [34] is based on RDF schemas for modeling context. -Logical models: the context is expressed as a set of facts or rules.…”

A semantic metadata infrastructure for UPnP AV to maximize quality of user experience

“…Supported version: v1, v2, v3 Metadata about various properties which have not been addressed in UPnP AV, require to modify the behavior of UPnP AV model, which means adding actions or services. For example, in order to add device adaption, work in [15] added a GetProtocolInfo() action to MediaRenderer to return device capabilities. However, extending UPnP AV like this way, added parts cannot be understood by other vendors, due to the limitation of UPnP description capabilities.…”

“…In [15], the authors investigated the context awareness content adaptation issue for UPnP AV MediaRenderers. They listed three ways to extend MediaRenderer to exposing device context metadata, adding a new action, adding a new service and adding new state variables.…”

Online UPnP A/V Device Database for Quick and Easy Capability Checking

“…The authors conclude that devices such as television sets should be equipped with network connectivity in order to force penetration of UPnP and DLNA services. Tusch and colleagues [5] extended the specification of UPnP A/V for contextaware usage of home multimedia systems. In particular, they dealt with the problem of incompatible file formats between the "MediaServer" and the "MediaRenderer" and showed a solution by implementing a control point that transcodes the exchanged media content.…”