AmbiStream: A Middleware for Multimedia Streaming on Heterogeneous Mobile Devices

Multimedia streaming when smartphones act as both clients and servers is difficult. Indeed, multimedia streaming protocols and associated data formats supported by today's smartphones are highly heterogeneous. At the same time, multimedia processing is resource consuming while smartphones are resource-constrained devices. To overcome this complexity, we present AmbiStream, a lightweight middleware layer solution, which enables applications that run on smartphones to easily handle multimedia streams. Contrarily to existing multimedia-oriented middleware that propose a complete stack for multimedia streaming, our solution leverages the available highly-optimized multimedia software stack of the smartphones' platforms and complements them with additional, yet resource-efficient, layers to enable interoperability. We introduce the challenges, present our approach and discuss the experimental results obtained when executing AmbiStream on both Android and iOS smartphones. Our results show that it is possible to perform adaptation at run time and still obtain streams with satisfactory quality.

[1]  Valérie Issarny,et al.  The iBICOOP middleware: Enablers and services for emerging pervasive computing environments , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

[2]  Rui Santos Cruz,et al.  A Personalized HTTP Adaptive Streaming WebTV , 2009, UCMedia.

[3]  Yérom-David Bromberg,et al.  Automatic Generation of Network Protocol Gateways , 2009, Middleware.

[4]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  A Bridging Framework for Universal Interoperability in Pervasive Systems , 2006, 26th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'06).

[5]  Roni Even,et al.  RTP Payload Format for H.264 Video , 2011, RFC.

[6]  Miska M. Hannuksela,et al.  RTP Payload Format for H.264 Video , 2005, RFC.

[7]  Gordon S. Blair,et al.  Supporting mobile multimedia applications through adaptive middleware , 1999, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[8]  Nalini Venkatasubramanian,et al.  Massive live video distribution using hybrid cellular and ad hoc networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks.

[9]  Gordon S. Blair.  On the Failure of Middleware to Support Multimedia Applications , 2000, IDMS.

[10]  Thomas Plagemann,et al.  Challenges and techniques for video streaming over mobile ad hoc networks , 2010, Multimedia Systems.

[11]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) , 1998, RFC.

[12]  Matthias R. Brust,et al.  Multimedia content distribution in hybrid wireless networks using weighted clustering , 2006, WMuNeP '06.

[13]  Petros Daras,et al.  User Centric Media , 2011 .

[14]  Valérie Issarny,et al.  Towards a formalization of mediating connectors for on the fly interoperability , 2009, 2009 Joint Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture & European Conference on Software Architecture.

[15]  Kevin Curran,et al.  A middleware architecture for streaming media over IP networks to mobile devices , 2003, 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003..

[16]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications , 1996, RFC.

[17]  Yérom-David Bromberg,et al.  Bridging the Gap between Legacy Services and Web Services , 2010, Middleware.

[18]  Yérom-David Bromberg,et al.  Starlink: Runtime Interoperability between Heterogeneous Middleware Protocols , 2011, 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[19]  Geoff Coulson,et al.  A Configurable Multimedia Middleware Platform , 1999, IEEE Multim..

[20]  Hermann Hellwagner,et al.  An Evaluation of Mobile End Devices in Multimedia Streaming Scenarios , 2010, MOBILWARE.

[21]  Ran Canetti,et al.  Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication (TESLA): Multicast Source Authentication Transform Introduction , 2005, RFC.

[22]  Klara Nahrstedt,et al.  iShare: Exploiting opportunistic ad hoc connections for improving data download of cellular users , 2010, 2010 IEEE Globecom Workshops.

[23]  Rik Van de Walle,et al.  Implementation strategies for efficient media fragment retrieval , 2012, Multimedia Tools and Applications.