A Content-Centric Platform for Home Networks

Due to the advance in wireless communication technologies, smartphones and tablets are becoming part of our life. People can use mobile devices to take pictures to share their life with others. In consideration of privacy and usability, this paper focuses on developing a private platform for content sharing in home. To facilitate content management and fast content retrieval, we design a Content-Centric Platform (CCP) that allows users to manage and search contents according to the tags (or attributes) of contents. With CCP, family members can access shared contents by the tags of contents without knowing the exact physical locations of the contents. The CCP platform has an auto-tagging subsystem that can add annotated tags automatically for the shared contents. It then applies a data mining technique to analyze the tags of the contents and creates a Tag Tree to represent the association of contents based on the tags. Furthermore, CCP also adopts a Tag Cloud mechanism to guide users to retrieve contents of interest. The functionalities provided by CCP include device joining and leaving, content information collection and distribution, auto-tagging and tag analysis. Finally, we have implemented a prototype system to verify the effectiveness of the CCP for content sharing in home networks.