International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 835438, 12 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/835438
Research Article

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

Roland Tusch, Michael Jakab, Julius Köpke, Armin Krätschmer, Michael Kropfberger, Sigrid Kuchler, Michael Ofner, Hermann Hellwagner, and Laszlo Böszörmenyi

M3-Systems Research Laboratory, Institute of Information Technology, University of Klagenfurt, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

Received 25 June 2008; Accepted 15 July 2008

Recommended by Harald Kosch

Abstract

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.