Facilitating content exchange among homes, ad-hoc communities and mobile users

Home users form the largest proportion of Internet users globally today. With decreasing costs for broadband adoption and increasing speeds, wireless home networks have become prevalent. Coupled with portable devices and large storage capacities, we find that current methods of user created content sharing for families and small ad-hoc communities are less than adequate. This is exacerbated when one or more members of the home or community happen to be mobile but wish to participate by offering and obtaining content. We present a new web-based architecture we developed, called HomeShare. HomeShare is aimed at addressing these problems, ensuring it remains resilient and flexible enough to withstand changes and advances in future networks and usage scenarios. At the same time, this architecture takes into consideration current consumer devices such as residential gateways and commodity UPnP media servers in the home. Practical verification was performed on real networks and preliminary results are presented.