Multi-Point Media Content Sharing Scheme in Internet of Things Networks

Media content sharing scheme among multiple devices is one of the most important service technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Typically, there are three kinds of schemes adopted for the content sharing among devices: screen mirroring, file casting, and content redirection. Among them, the content redirection in which a sink pulls the content from a cloud server based on universal resource locator information received from a source is a very promising technology in terms of resource usage. However, for the content redirection scheme, the link quality between the access point (AP) and sink must be reliable enough to share the high-quality multimedia services. The link quality problem usually occurs because AP and sink are installed without considering the link quality between the two devices. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce a multi-point content delivery scheme, which transfers the media content from both source and AP to sink simultaneously. The proposed scheme can operate in two modes, namely power combining mode that increases the received signal power by combining the transmitted power of both devices and bandwidth aggregation mode that increases the bandwidth of the received signal by aggregating the bandwidth of the transmitted signal of both devices. Numerical results show that using the proposed scheme, with 10 m of AP and sink separation distance, we can get 300% ~ 400% performance improvement; therefore, the proposed scheme can be a core technology for media content sharing in the IoT era.