A Cloud-Based Platform for Watching Same Content on Three-Screen TV Continuously in Smart Home

Watching Same Content on Three-Screen TV Continuously (WSC3STVC) has been considered as one of the representative services in smart homes recently. This service offers content mobility among multiple kinds of screens based on user position in home. Quality of Experience (QoE) and service implementation cost are two important challenges for supporting WSC3STVC service. To the best of our knowledge, there is no visible attempt to design a comprehensive platform for supporting this service in smart homes. Benefiting from cloud computing, peer-to-peer (P2P) network, clustering and H.264 SVC transcoding, this paper proposes a QoE-aware and cost-effective platform for supporting WSC3STVC service in smart home. The strong points of the proposed platform are transcoding in cloud instead of Home GateWay (HGW) for decreasing HGW cost, content switching inside HGW for reducing service delay, using a cloud-managed P2P network for improving bandwidth between cloud and homes and also clustering homes for reducing transfer delay between homes.