A P2P-to-UPnP Proxy Gateway Architecture for Home Multimedia Content Distribution

Deploying advanced home networking technologies and modern home-networked devices in residential environments provides a playground for new home applications and services. Because home multimedia entertainment is among the most essential home applications, this paper presents an appealing home media content sharing scenario: home-networked devices can discover neighboring devices and share local media content, as well as enormous amounts of Internet media content in a convenient and networked manner. This ideal scenario differs from traditional usages that merely offer local media content and require tedious manual operations of connection setup and file transfer among various devices. To achieve this goal, this study proposes a proxy gateway architecture for home multimedia content distribution. The proposed architecture integrates several functional mechanisms, including UPnP-based device discovery, home gateway, Internet media provision, and in-home media content delivery. This design addresses several inherent limitations of device heterogeneity and network interoperability on home and public networks, and allows diverse home-networked devices to play media content in an identical and networked manner. Prototypical implementation of the proposed proxy gateway architecture develops a proof-of-concept software, integrating a BitTorrent peer-to-peer client, a UPnP protocol stack, and a UPnP AV media server, as well as media distribution and management components on the OSGi home gateway platform. Practical demonstration shows the proposed design and scenario realization, offering users an unlimited volume of media content for home multimedia entertainment. Keywords: Proxy gateway, universal plug and play (UPnP), peer-to-peer (P2P) file service, media content sharing, home multimedia, home networks