Opportunistic Crowdsourcing for Collective Music Sharing

Abstract: The fast spreading of smart mobile devices has changed the way people create and share multimedia content. Infrastructure networks, such as 802.11 and cellular, can provide users Internet access to disseminate this content, however their services may be limited due to insufficient deployment of infrastructure equipment, network congestion as downloading of large-size multimedia content becomes highly prevalent, or simply high prices that prevent users from utilizing these services. Middleware architectures have been designed and implemented on smart mobile device platforms to distribute content opportunistically when devices are within each other's communication range: mobile devices can either utilize connections to fixed infrastructure, such as public access points when in range, or distribute content to other devices directly in ad hoc fashion when in proximity. In this work we have designed and implemented a real-time music-sharing application that utilizes a content-centric opportunistic networking middleware. The application provides an interface for users to publish audio files stored in their own mobile devices to a subscriber jukebox that is within their communication range. The jukebox then plays the audio file that is first in queue in its playlist by streaming it from the publisher user device. User devices are synchronized with the playlist in the jukebox so that users can observe the contents of the playlist on their own displays in real-time.