INTERMEDIA - D9.1 - State of the art on multimedia content sharing environment with focus on the adaptation system architecture

The aim of this report is mainly to identify requirements, and collect and analyze current state-of-the-art technologies about content sharing environment. This report consists of three sections: requirements, system architecture of content management and sharing, and content adaptation support. In the requirement section, we classify needed features in general and from systems to users' point of views. General requirements come from the study of ubiquitous computing environments (UBICOMP) and other research fields such as 3D content sharing and distribution for figuring out common research challenges (e.g. user mobility, adaptability, heterogeneity, personalization, multiple users etc.). In system aspect, we focus more on requirements for UPnP-based content management and sharing architectures as UPnP is widely-accepted standard designed to enable the integration and interoperability of electronic devices in the home environment. In user's point of view, we discuss requirements for user profiles which give a system inputs to identify user preferences and the system adapts content accordingly while being shared by users and devices. In the second section, we describe current status of content management and sharing architecture in terms of peer-to-peer file sharing and multimedia content sharing in wired/wireless and infrastructure/ad-hoc network environments. Following this, we discuss the use of UPnP AV technologies for sharing multimedia in the home environment with the analysis of its goal, scope, benefits and drawbacks. As the first prototype, we propose an early stage of ongoing demonstrator, "Multimedia content adaptation and migration" which supports seamless content delivery and adaptation depending on user's location and preferred display based on UPnP AV. In INTERMEDIA, as WP9 is tightly coupled with WP8 (Multimedia content adaptation), the last main section describes required system architecture and features in order to support content adaptation. We also discuss various requirements (content, adaptation/annotation tools, streaming environments, etc.) on how content sharing module could interact and collaborate with adaptation module for future collaboration towards INTERMEDIA vision.