06-01-2014, 04:52 PM
Share your view: wireless multi-hop video streaming using Android phones
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Abstract
With the rising penetration of smartphones in the
consumer market, mobile multimedia content is becoming the
dominant form of information that people produce and consume
on a daily basis. In this paper we present a wireless multi-hop
video streaming application for mobile phones with the Android
operating system. This application allows to share live informa-
tion captured by mobile phone sensors (e.g., camera, microphone)
with persons that might be multiple wireless hops away. The
video streaming is based on peer-to-peer communication between
mobile phones, i.e. without the use of video processing servers or
network infrastructure. We show the feasibility of such peer-
to-peer video streaming application for Android phones in a
variety of experiments that evaluate various video streaming
scenarios, including various video codecs and various generations
of Android phones.
I NTRODUCTION
The International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) statis-
tics on mobile subscriptions indicates five billion mobile sub-
scriptions for 2010 [1], with a 17% penetration of smartphones
in 2009 [2]. The rapid adoption of smartphones has created a
unique opportunity for mobile multimedia services for mobile
users. Currently a majority of smartphones are equipped with
both hardware that supports real-time video processing and
ad-hoc wireless communication between peers and this allows
real-time video streaming over multiple wireless hops between
peer devices. Phones within communication range of each
other automatically establish a wireless link creating a client
mesh network (ad-hoc network of devices). Each phone in the
client mesh network is able to produce/consume video and also
acts as a relay to forward video to its next hop neighbours.
Peer-to-peer video streaming from the cameras on smartphones
to people nearby allows users to share what they see. Such
streaming can be used in a variety of applications, in particular
in various social network applications including sharing unfor-
gettable moments with friends that can be multiple wireless
hops away, cooperative fieldwork (providing video sharing for
teams distributed in a small area, e,g. teams of repairmen, and
search and rescue teams in disaster areas), and support for
health impaired persons including the elderly.
Overview of Android System
Android is an operating system for mobile devices that are
developed by the Open Handset Alliance. User applications
are mostly written in Java and run on Android’s own Java
virtual machine (named Dalvik). Fig. 2 shows the Android
system architecture, which consists of the Linux kernel with
device drivers and the Android runtime environment (along
with a number of libraries) that support interactions between
the Linux kernel and the high-level application framework.
The application framework released in a bundle as the Android
SDK [5] provides high-level Java interfaces for accessing the
underlying resources, such as camera and WiFi. For example,
our video streaming application makes use of the activity
manager to detect and respond to events when triggered. The
use of standard development toolkit encourages interoperabil-
ity between components and maximises portability of the
application.
Overall Performance: Live streaming in Action!
Having investigated the performance of video coding and
the capacity of multi-hops forwarding on the selected Android
phones, we conduct a number of multi-hop experiments by
deploying our application on the phones and streaming live
video (either using the test sequences or video feed captured by
the camera) to evaluate the overall performance and to validate
the feasibility of peer-to-peer video streaming on Android
phones. For these experiments we use the multi-hop chain
topology described earlier.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a wireless multi-hop video
streaming application for Android mobile phones. This ap-
plication allows users to capture live video feeds using the
mobile phone camera and to share these feeds with people
who might be multiple wireless hops away. The video feeds are
shared using wireless client mesh network (ad hoc network)
established between mobile phones. Thus the video streaming
does not rely on a traditional network infrastructure (such as
the cellular), therefore it is a free-of-charge communication.
Such a multi-hop video streaming can be used in a variety of
application domains including social networking.