Implementation and Evaluation of Caching Method to Increase the Speed of UPnP Gateway

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) works toward a vision of an interoperable network of PCs, home appliances and mobile devices in the home, enabling a seamless environment for sharing and growing new digital media and content services with UPnP technology. However, UPnP device interaction is currently only available in a single local area network (LAN). UPnP gateway technology has been proposed as an application level gateway in order to make devices connected to the different LAN interact. One problem with the UPnP gateway is that it takes several seconds to discover a device on another LAN. One of the reasons for this is the multicast message from the process, which needs to create a new connection between gateways when the UPnP gateway replies to the device search request from a device on the other LAN. In this paper, we propose as a solution to this problem a caching method designed to increase the speed of the UPnP gateway for the device search request. We implement and evaluate the prototype of the proposed system and verify that we improve the response time for the search procedure by using the caching method.