An approach for QoE-based media sharing in DLNA home network

Over the last decades, various kinds of Internet enabled devices have been developed. DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) has provided standard guidelines to improve the interoperability of DLNA-capable devices and to enhance the usability of digital contents through DLNA Certified devices. However, for several reasons, the transmission for media sharing between DLNA devices is still not seamless and users still experience low quality services, even between DLNA certified devices. In this paper, we address this problem from the respective of QoE (Quality of Experience) and present a system designed to keep user's service quality with reduced network resource consumption in terms of network bandwidth usage. As the key component in the system we propose Media Server that keeps media files encoded different qualities and delivers media files to multiple DLNA client devices, considering available bandwidth in a network. At each device request, the server chooses the media file that is the most appropriate for the devices with respect to the network status at the time of the request. Media files are classified into 5 different levels where each level has different bit rate. Before transmission, Media Server checks for the network status and selects the best video level that can be delivered to the client device with the best quality. We present the usefulness of our approach with results obtained from experimental studies to deliver video services seamlessly to meet users' quality requirements. Our results show that the proposed approach can also make better utilization of the limited home-network resources.