A profile-based multimedia sharing scheme with virtual community, based on personal space in a ubiquitous computing environment

For ubiquitous computing environments, an important parameter is whether all the components in the specific environment can connect with one another. Given this capability, we can share various kinds of content across mobile terminals. This paper introduces an effective scheme to manage multimedia sharing based on specially designed profiles and a virtual community. A virtual community is defined as any specific group of users connected for a common interest. Specifically the proposed scheme consists of two layers, i.e., a community construction layer and a multimedia sharing layer, based on personal spaces, which are responsible for constructing and managing the multimedia sharing community. The community construction layer, which is designed to be run on the mobile terminals, provides an effective way to find community members simultaneously, based on specially designed profiles, such as a user profile and an abstract profile. The multimedia sharing layer is responsible for sharing multimedia content, and is constructed as a specially designed scheme based on locality. The proposed scheme provides an effective multimedia sharing mechanism within a community. Simulation results show that the number of messages and the time required for community member discovery is reduced by 32% and 73%, respectively, in comparison with the conventional DHT-based scheme. The approach also reduces the time to exchange content by 50% with respect to the same baseline.