An Efficient Scheme to Construct Virtual Community for Multimedia Content Sharing Based on Profile in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment

For ubiquitous computing environments, an important assumption is that all the components in any specific environment are connected with each other. With this assumption, 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. The proposed scheme consists of two layers, i.e., a community construction layer and a multimedia sharing layer, 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 abstracted profile. The multimedia sharing layer is responsible for sharing multimedia contents, and is constructed as a specially designed scheme based on locality. Specifically this paper focuses on an effective community construction scheme performed by community construction layer. The proposed scheme provides an effective community construction mechanism. 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.