| Summary: | 博士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 電機工程學系 === 102 === The advances in home networking and multimedia technologies have been raising consumers' interests in sharing their multimedia contents among a variety of devices. Notably, to share contents among, e.g. TV sets, mobile phones, desktop computers, and so on, in a residential area, becomes a very welcome application. Although there are several standards about how to share, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) seems to be the most popular one. DLNA defines interoperability guidelines for hardware and software vendors to meet the interoperability requirements. Thus, DLNA-certified consumer electronics can enable users to easily access and share multimedia contents within their home networks. Moreover, consumers may want to remotely access their contents while they are visiting friends. They want to make it as if they were still at homes. Although the DLNA guidelines now suggest Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections for remote access to the home networks, it may encounter problems. For example, company users may be disallowed to use VPN connections by firewall policy; private content may be disclosed unintentionally due to lack of authentication for remote devices; private network address may be conflicted if trying to access data in-between homes. In this dissertation, a new distributed architecture is proposed that can allow mobile users to seamlessly share and access contents between home and visited networks.
The proposed architecture mainly relies on the home gateway to work. The gateway provides a web-based user interface which allows its mobile users to browse home contents and interesting devices to play without installing any software. The gateway can act as a control point on behalf of its user to guide a remote rendering device to pull and play content from a local media server. Instead of opening a VPN channel to transport any UPnP messages to remote networks, the proposed architecture utilizes XMPP for wrapping and sending UPnP messages in-between gateways. The XMPP messages are transported by the HTTP-like WebSocket protocol, which can easily pass through firewall without extra settings.
Within this dissertation, the proposed architecture is illustrated and compared with other research and related work. This proposed architecture outperforms the others by no need for help from extra servers on the Internet, no requirement for additional software installation on mobile user devices, and no modification to residential rendering devices and media servers. Meanwhile, the response performance of playing content remotely is still maintained at an acceptable degree, compared to playing within the same network locally.
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