Location Awareness—Improving Distributed Multimedia Communication

Multimedia creation and consumption is highly intensive and makes up the majority of Internet traffic nowadays. End-users are able to share their digital content with each other and to build communities based on interests, which often differ drastically according to location. Distributing these media using a central server can be quite expensive for a content provider. Distributed (peer-to-peer like) systems share costs evenly among participants. Thus, distributed multimedia systems will be more important in the future. The global distribution of end-users aggravates high-quality delivery of multimedia content. In this paper, we argue that geographical location-awareness greatly helps distributed multimedia communication. It increases the quality of multimedia content delivery and at the same time satisfies the growing need for more personalized, location-based services. In this paper, as a proof of concept, we introduce an overlay structure for distributed multimedia systems (and similar systems), which is location-aware and uses the locations of its nodes to optimize node-to-node communication for performance and delay. At the same time, the system enables location-based services.