Collaborative Streaming-based Media Content Sharing in WiFi-enabled Home Networks

Abstract

In home networks, it has been challenging to provide flexible and scalable media content sharing among heterogeneous consumer electronic devices. Upcoming industrial standard WiFi-Direct will prompt the popular WiFi-equipped devices to establish instant ad-hoc peer-to-peer (i.e., direct) connectivity. In this paper, we propose DOMS (Decentralized cOllaborative Media content Streaming) that realizes flexible media content sharing by exploiting collaborative segment-based streaming amongst WiFi devices via the temporarily-established direct links. We implement the DOMS prototype devices with embedded computing machines and verify its performance under several realistic experimental configurations. The realized prototype devices altogether show improved sharing performance by supporting two-times more concurrent devices at target media quality when compared with conventional non-collaborative (i.e., client-server) streaming(1).