Media Distribution in a Pervasive Computing Environment

Abstract

Distribution of media in the fast growing world of digital stored content and multimedia supporting devices with connectivity, calls for a new media distribution architecture. The user should be provided with the experience of having an overview of his full media collection, regardless of the time, the place, and the connectivity. Transparent distributed data management is crucial to Ambient Intelligent applications. The proposed media distribution architecture offers a possible solution. It provides the user with the experience of having all his media collections available at any time, in any place, and managing them regardless of connection availability in the heterogeneous environment. This experience is enabled in our system by the separation of metadata and content handling. Other features are efficient handling of snapshots, usage of various database technologies, and leveraging device and service discovery mechanisms.