[Invited Paper] Content Scheduling and Adaptation for Networked and Context-Aware Digital Signage: A Literature Survey

Abstract

Digital signage (DS) is becoming well accepted as a ubiquitous medium that can deliver and display various types of information by specifying the location and time. In this paper, we put our focus on the following two directions of DS development: (1) Networked DS: networking displays to form a large-scale open DS network that allows content providers to submit contents, and schedule, deliver, and display the contents at the right place and time, (2) Context-aware DS: displaying contents appropriate to the current status of people, places, and objects around the display, that is, changes in context. This paper gives an overview of the research being done on these issues, specifically, content scheduling, real-time content adaptation, and context sensing. Finally, some of the future challenges will be discussed.

Scheduling Content in Pervasive Display Systems

“…(1) a study of prior literature including: (a) those reported in Section 2.2, (b) a recent survey of content scheduling [86], and (c) prior requirements elicitation initiatives [8,83], (2) use cases for future display networks [22,26], and, (3) experiences of operating the world's largest research testbed for display networks [35].…”

“…all files in a directory), no criteria is used to reduce the available content down to a smaller subset for playback. However, it is not uncommon for signage platforms to schedule based on descriptive features of the content such as format constraints (must have an audio soundtrack or portrait orientation) [86], content type (e.g. show adverts or news), media type (e.g.…”

“…The selection of the display(s) on which to present content is a key choice for any scheduling algorithm. It is often necessary to schedule content to specific displays or groups of displays [86] (e.g. to show a conference schedule outside a meeting room [83], or an advert on all displays in part of a shopping mall).…”

“…As noted earlier, previous requirements have often been targeted to a specific deployment context (one notable exception being those from Storz et al [83] who reflected on their experiences with three heterogeneous technology probes). By contrast, we deliberately sought out these previous requirement sets, others' experiences developing and deploying displays (Section 2.2), a recent literature survey [86], recent use cases for future display networks [22,26], and our own extensive experiences of fifteen years operating the world's largest research testbed for display networks. We compare our eleven requirements with three representative sets from the literature: Storz et al's [83] (2006) requirements based on experiences with three technology probes, used to inform the design of a computational model and API for the early e-Campus software; Elhart et al [31]'s (2014) requirements for scheduling interactive and concurrent applications in display networks, and Bushman and Labrinidis's [8] (2019) requirements for a utility-based scheduler to drive a set of bus stop displays.…”

“…In response to the requirements articulated in Section 3, we have presented a novel multi-stage architecture that characterises three distinct phases in the scheduling of content for pervasive digital displays. Unlike prior research into display scheduling [8,30,31,62,70,78,83,86], we do not prescribe a specific algorithm or formula for optimization or constraint resolution. Instead, we seek to subdivide the problem of scheduling into three constituent challenges that are distinct from any algorithm or approach.…”