International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4Issue4- April 2013

Semantically Enhanced Content Management in Media Cloud

Saravanan. K#1 and Jayalakshmi. N*2
#

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Regional Centre, Anna University Tirunelveli, India * Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Regional Centre, Anna University Tirunelveli, India general metadata stored in MPEG-7 or similar formats which makes it difficult to find. To overcome this searching difficulty, a new architecture of ontology cloud has been constructed, which contains the library of ontologies, providing Ontology as a Service (OaaS) to the media cloud. It replaces the index search by an ontology-based search [3] that facilitates retrieving of content in an efficient and semantically meaningful manner. Personalization of content is done at each user level by applying role-based authorization mechanism [2] for granting or denying access to the multimedia resources. Thus, with the advent of media cloud, users can enjoy sharing of media content in different homes with greater flexibility. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly overview of the related happening in the media cloud. In Section 3, comprehensive details related to the architecture of the media cloud are presented. Section 4 describes the interaction of devices inside the home network. Section 5 depicts the ontology as a service (OaaS) provided by the ontology cloud and section 6 shows the features of the Foreign Content Aggregator that assists in the communication of foreign devices. Section 7 describes the implementation details and Section 8 gives the result analysis. Section 9 summarizes with a brief conclusive remarks and discussion on future works. II. RELATED WORK Media cloud assists in the processing of multimedia content and render it to users across the community cloud [5]. With the increasing amount of multimedia, a semantic approach for the processing of the content is required. Ontologies provide semantic multimedia services for the multimedia computing [6]. However, there is a need to manage massive amounts of diverse user-created data. An architectural framework for a cloud multimedia platform is proposed, where storing and processing of massive amount of media content in social networking web applications such as Face book and Flickr is achieved [8]. Slawomir and et.al [14] proposed an authentication framework using a zero-knowledge-proof (ZKP) technique where personalized content can be shared in a trusted environment. Semantic similarity between words is identified by using novel pattern extraction algorithm and a pattern clustering algorithm [9]. It improved accuracy in community mining task, but a time consuming process. Qun Ren and et.al, [16] proposed semantic caching, in that both the semantic

AbstractCloud computing is becoming a key element in service provision, allowing access to resources across internet transparently without the hassle of investing hardware resources nor maintaining or managing them. At present, sharing of media files with friends and families get admired worldwide. UPNA or DLNA are protocols designed to share content between devices within home network. It lacks the mechanism to share content outside the home domain and it doesnt support advance d search capabilities. To alleviate the above problem, we propose Media Cloud, a middleware instantiated in set-top boxes to manage media transparently allowing uniform access to multimedia content belonging to different home. In addition, semantic annotations are added to the multimedia resources and ontologybased searches enabled to enhance the searching facilities. Keyword UPnP, DLNA, Multimedia content, Semantic annotations, Ontology.

INTRODUCTION The term Cloud Computing has become ubiquitous in the IT world. It is a platform for accessing and utilizing resources via the web. In recent years, the growth of multimedia applications such as video, audio, image has increased significantly. Such multimedia resources are increasingly viewed and shared through web 2.0 based applications such as Flickr and You Tube [2]. The current state-of the-art devices can share their content only by uploading it on external applications. There is no infrastructure to manage media resources in the home environments or outside of it. So, the need for better media management in the home environment increases. In home environments, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) which is an extension of plug and play promoted by UPnP forum or Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) are protocols that let the users share the multimedia content within heterogeneous devices in the home network. However, these protocols have certain limitations of preventing the users to share or access the multimedia content outside their home domain. It also doesnt provide support for searching across multiple repositories in parallel and searching is done only by directory hierarchy browsing. To alleviate the above problem, we propose Media Cloud, a middleware instantiated in home gateways that enable users to share media transparently outside of their local domain. Metadata plays an important role in the retrieval of multimedia resources. The available metadata are often
I.

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International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) - Volume4Issue4- April 2013
descriptions and the results of the previous queries are maintained in the cache. It reduced the network traffic but there is a lack of cache coherency control and it does not process more complicated queries. Semantic-based web service discovery used Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) [12] for matching the service request with the service description by the expansion of additional terms (retrieved from ontology). Compared to the existing models, proposed model of Media cloud contains the following features: 1. Allows multiple users across different home network to share/access content, 2. More personalized view of the content at each user level ,3. Better content adaption and 4. Enhanced searching capabilities. III. MEDIA CLOUD A RCHITECTURE Media Cloud is a middleware that enables classification, searching and sharing of media across the home domain and the cloud. It is sited in between the home network and the Internet to communicate with the devices located in differed home networks that belong to the cloud and to share those contents as if they are in the same home domain. Media Cloud is composed of Home Domain Manager, Content Indexer, Foreign Content Aggregator, Home Media Indexes, IMS Enabler, Access policy server and Ontology Server. Many home networks join the Media Cloud to share and access media files that is being shared by constituent members of the cloud. Each home network consists of a set of distributed components (UPnP-enabled functions in UPnP based environments and those that are deployed in home gateway). The UPnP enabled components include UPnP media server, UPnP media renderers and UPnP control point. These components are usually found in UPnP based environments. 1) UPnP media server provides information and streams media data to the users on the network. It is a computer system that stores digital media and shares this content with other devices. Media server provide a service to the control points for browsing the media content of the server and deliver the content to the user. 2) UPnP media renderer play back the media content provided by the server. Media renderer is controlled by the control point. 3) UPnP control point is an instance that interconnects media server with media renderers. When a device is added to the network, it advertises its service to the control point. The control point retrieves the device description to study the device capabilities and to interact with the devices. The control point send actions to the device service by suitable control messages to the control URL of the service. It let the users to browse the contents of the media server and deliver the content to the media renderer. The home gateway is a network device that connects a home network to a larger network. The components of home gateway include policy agent, IMS user agent and presence agent, UPnP remote extension, metadata server and tag server. 1) The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) provides multimedia services. The user agent establishes a remote session between different homes. The presence agent updates the home presence status using the functions provided by the centralized IMS enabler. 2) Policy Agent allows administrators i.e. privileged users to configure policies. The configured policies are then added to the realm. The policy agent relies on Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) which sends decision request to Policy Decision Point (PDP), obtains the policy decisions and let users know whether they are authorized to access the requested resource. It generates a session token identifier which is validated to determine if the user has given permission to access the device contents. 3) UPnP remote session enables sharing of contents between UPnP terminals connected to remote network i.e. it allows seamless connection between different home networks thus enabling UPnP devices or control point in a home network discover and interact with UPnP device in another home network. Thus authorized remote users will experience the remote devices behaving as if they belonged to the same LAN. 4) The metadata server is a centralized repository for storing and managing metadata created by the local users. It uses Semantic Open Grid Service Architecture (S-OGSA) for metadata management and enables ontology based searches over the metadata available.

Fig. 1 Media Cloud Architecture. The figure shows the different home networks which are constituent members of media cloud share and access media content

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5) The tag server is a component which is used to store user-defined tags related to multimedia resources. Tag is a unique identifier which is a type of Uniform Resource Identifier. The Foreign Content Aggregator makes the home network a part of cloud. It uses katta [1] which is a distributed application, provides service for managing high loads, very large datasets and indices of different types. It helps searching across multiple repositories. The main goal of Content Indexer is to manage communication of devices within a home network. It discovers devices, extracts metadata from media files, creates search index and adapts incoming and outgoing streams. Creation of search index is the most important task of Content Indexer. The index created with this information is stored in Home Media Index (HMI) databases. The Home Domain Manager (HDM) manages communications with different devices and protocols. It uses plug-in system to support new features and adds specific abilities to support the different device capabilities. The centralized components deployed by the Media Cloud include IMS Enabler, Access Policy server and Ontology server. 1) IMS Enabler provides IP multimedia services. It is composed of Core IMS and presence server. The presence server is used to manage service and user-related presence information (e.g. availability, status etc...). It holds valuable context information and builds the basis for stream transfer between devices. The core IMS is the control component that implements IMS call session control functions (CSCFs). It performs the roles of core control, session control and media resource control functions for users. 2) Access Policy Server is the security component of the Media Cloud that provides authorization services and facilitates tracking and control of media files. The access policy server acts as Policy Decision Point (PDP) which accepts access control requests, validates against the policy defined held in policy repository, makes decisions and returns the access control responses. 3) Ontology server is a kind of information system that serves as a link in enabling diverse users and applications to discover ontologies. It enables ontology based searches on the already created indices that are stored in HMI database thus provides advanced searching facilities. Ontology Cloud contains ontologies developed and provides relationships between entities in different ontologies. It also provides ontology as a service (OaaS) to the requesting cloud and enables semantically enhanced searching capabilities. IV. CONTENT INDEXING The Content Indexer manages interaction of devices inside the home network. The most important task of Content Indexer is to create search index for contents using collection of information like metadata, media file type, creation data and Internet related information. Content Indexer has a functional module Content Skeleton. It uses Lucene, an open source information retrieval software library and a high performance indexer that enables searching over the index using ranked or fielded searches. Lucene is very much suitable for application requiring indexing and searching capabilities. Lucene supports different type of queries like Boolean, proximity, phrase, wildcard, term boosting or range queries.

Fig. 2 Content Indexing. The figure shows the structure of an index entry (document) and the offerings of the different modules. Index created is stored in HMI database

A. Content Skeleton Every media file is analyzed and the Content Indexer creates document for each file. A document is a collection of field-value pairs. The document created is added into the index. The Index Writer writes the document into the index and adds new entries into it. Lucene index is a directory. Every index entry corresponds to a document inside the

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directory. The fields differ by number and nature depending on the media file. The fields for every media file can be classified in three categories. 1) The Content description category contains metadata, social network feeds and internet related information. Fields of this category are indexed and stored in the document to make it possible to search across them. 2) The Access information category contains protocol details, hardware information, network address and ports for communicating with the device within the home network. These fields are accessed by the Home Domain Manager to extract information from the device. These fields are not indexed but stored in the document. 3) The Security category contains access control information and license information (in case of commercial content). These fields are accessed by the security system to limit the usage of the content, for instance, which can access it, if it is shared in the cloud. The index created is stored in Home Media Index (HMI) database. V. ONTOLOGY A S A SERVICE The query made by the user is passed to the ontology server which translates the search string into ontology based query. With this query ontology based searches are performed on the ontology cloud which is the storage repository for the ontologies developed. Ontology editor assists in the creation and manipulation of ontologies and express it in any of the ontology languages. Protg is an ontology editor used in Media Cloud. Protg ontologies are expressed in a variety of formats like RDF(s), OWL and XML schema.
Fig. 3 Ontology as a Service Architecture. The figure sketches out the composition of ontology cloud which provides Ontology as a Service (OaaS) to the media cloud

Ontology cloud shown in Fig. 3 provides services to diverse users. The ontology obtained by the server is parsed by Jena OWL parser which produces semantic results for the query made by the user. Thus Media Cloud enables semantically enabled searches on the Home Media Indexes where already created indices are stored and enhances the searching capabilities. VI. FOREIGN CONTENT AGGREGATOR Foreign Content Aggregator enables communication of foreign devices transparently. It makes home network a part of cloud i.e. the content stored in the device are made available in the cloud. It uses katta, a scalable, failure tolerant, distributed, data storage for real time access running on many commodity hardware similar to Hadoop and MapReduce. Foreign Content Aggregator is composed of two functional modules namely Content Server and Content Delivery Module.

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Fig. 4 Foreign Content Aggregator. The figure shows two functional modules content server and content delivery module. The content stream is delivered through the FCA to the foreign devices

The Content Server Module enables users outside the domain to search content within the HMI database. The Content Delivery Module delivers the content to the requesting node outside the home domain. A. Content Server Users share all type of user generated and professional content through web 2.0 sites such as Flickr and You Tube, where the content has to be uploaded, annotated, commented on and downloaded. It is therefore necessary to let users share their own content to trusted individuals without having to upload it on external sites. Foreign Content Aggregator uses Katta, a distributed application. Each node hosts a so called Content Server. Nodes serve index shards. Nodes are the participants of Media Cloud. An index for Katta is a folder with a set of subfolders. These subfolders are called index shards. The kind of index shards can be different. The Content Server determines which index shard is supported. The user searches the Content within an index by connecting to all nodes and merging results from all nodes into a unified result list. Thus Foreign Content Aggregator allows parallel search in several repositories as if they are in the same domain. The Master node manages all nodes and index shard assignment. The zookeeper, a locking system is used for Master Node communication. Zookeeper manages information about node failure, configuring information, number of nodes that are live and also provides group services. It updates this information to all the members of the Media Cloud. The user communicates with the nodes on a search request. Katta supports distributed scoring. It gets the document frequency for the query made and the value is passed to all nodes. In this way, it attains the goal of finding the contents that better match the search. B. Content Delivery Module The Content Delivery Module sends the content to other Media Cloud instances located outside the home domain. This module transmits content by streaming or by any other protocol. The source device which contains the content requested by the other node streams the content to the Home Domain Manager. The CDM selects appropriate protocol to send the content across the Internet. The destination node receives the content and streams it to the Home Domain Manager. The HDM at the destination uses plug-in system, and adds new plug-ins to support the device capability and the protocol used. Media Cloud supports communication of different devices in different homes transparently by performing content adaption. VII. IMPLEMENTATION

Media cloud has been developed using cloudsim, which is an extensible simulation toolkit for modelling and simulating both single as well as inter-networked clouds. The development phase comprises of the creation of the various components of media cloud including the cloud environment. The Home Media Index database was developed using the Apache Lucene, a high performance indexer.

Fig. 5 Home Network Environment. This figure sketches out the indices created by the members of the media cloud stored in HMI databases

Security in media cloud is maintained using access server policy. Unlike other approaches, authentication in media cloud is handled at each user level, associated with their roles and we applied role-based authentication mechanism. Only if the authentication is successful the users were allowed to access the multimedia content. The authorized user can view the indices created and stored in the HMI databases by the other media cloud instances through the Home Network environment showed in Fig. 5.

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Fig. 6 Cloudlet Environment. This figure shows whether the requested resource fits to the policy defined

The cloudlet environment showed in Fig.6 was developed to make user know whether the requested services fit on the authorization policy and they are either granted or denied with the resource.

Fig. 8 Content Delivery Module. Delivers the content to the foreign devices adapting to the device capability

The Foreign Content Aggregator showed in Fig. 8 separates the content based on the protocol used. If the source and the destination device use the same protocol and have the same device capability then the content is automatically streamed into the media renderer and the content is delivered. Otherwise the Home Domain Manager in the destination system uses plug in system to adapt to the device capability and deliver the content. VIII. RESULT ANALYSIS

Fig. 7 Content Management Environment. Registers the accessed files

We developed the content management environment as showed in Fig. 7 to register all the files that are accessed by the privileged users. The users depending upon their role and access privilege can add, delete or modify contents in the media cloud.

A. Results Based on Indexing Media cloud acts as a proxy for delivering content across the home domain and the cloud and it offers search services. Searching operation over the index uses resources already allocated. This search operation over the media cloud might be recurrent. There may be large number of members of the cloud so media cloud STB might obtain multiple simultaneous search requests. Fig. 9 shows the results of the total number of content during each access and Fig. 10 provide the number of content indexed during each search operation.

Total Content
52 No. of records

50
48 Total Content

46
44 0 5 10 No. of Access

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Fig. 9 Total number of content during each access

Same Protocol Vs Different Protocols

No. of Records 60 50 40 30 Content delivered with same protocol

Total Content Vs Indexed Content

100 50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Total Content Indexed Content Total Content

Total Content

No. of Records

20

10
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No. of Access

No. of Access
Fig. 13 Comparison between contents delivered with same protocol and contents delivered with different protocol among the total contents Fig. 10 Total content versus number of content indexed

B. Results Based on Protocols Used for Content Delivery While handling communication with devices outside the home network, the foreign content aggregator separates the content based on the protocol used.

Fig. 11 shows the results of the number of contents that are delivered using the same protocol as that of the source device. Fig. 12 provides the results of the number of contents that are delivered using different protocols and Fig. 13 shows the comparison between the contents delivered with same protocol and different protocols. CONCLUSION AND F UTURE WORK Media Cloud achieves transparency and provides a secured, economically effective and manageable solution for bringing cloud computing paradigm to content management among federated home networks. It supports different devices by performing content adaption and enhances cooperation among different home networks facilitating an easy to manage solution. Unlike other approaches Media Cloud handles authorization at a granularity of homes. It relies on role-based authorization mechanisms at each user level, associated with roles for granting or denying access to resources through the access policy server. Thus it mitigates the privacy problem and provides a personalized view of the content. Ontologybased searches enhance the searching process and provide more relevant search result. However, media cloud does not allow service requests that are formed using specialized query languages. Techniques that facilitate complex queries must be developed.
IX.

Total Content Vs Same Protocol

60 No. of Records Total Content 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 No. of Access Content delivered with same protocol

Fig.11 Comparison between total content and contents delivered with same protocol

Total Content Vs Different Protocol

60 No. of Records 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 No. of Access 7 Content delivered with different protocol Total Content

REFERENCES
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Fig. 12 Comparison between total content and contents delivered with different protocols

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