A Seamless Screen Switching Scheme for N-Screen Services Based on Context Awareness

Abstract

Owing to advances in N-screen technologies that support screen switching among multiple internet-enabled smart devices, people now can use their devices to watch contents even while they are moving. However, current N-screen technologies require human intervention for switching between screens of multiple devices. To overcome this restriction, we propose a seamless screen switching scheme in which screen switching can occur without any user intervention by making use of context information collected from smart devices with embedded sensors to understand local contexts surrounding the user. Our scheme makes it possible to accurately detect the user's contexts through the sensors to predict a specific smart device at which the user is about to arrive, and to provide seamless screen switching between smart devices by prefetching contents in advance so that the user can watch the contents without interruption. In order to minimize the amount of contents to be prefetched, we also propose an enhanced prefetching scheme that takes into account user's movement direction. According to our performance evaluation, the average switching delay time was approximately 480 ms, and traffic loads was reduced by on average of 12 % by the enhanced prefetching scheme compared to an existing one when the user is watching Full HD contents across smart devices dispersed throughout an office of 20 m by 20 m.