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

Abstract EN

One 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.