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An empirical analysis of serendipitous media sharing among campus-wide wireless users

Published:04 February 2011Publication History
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Abstract

Contemporary systems use centralized as well as peer-to-peer mechanisms for the large scale distribution of media objects. In this work, we investigate a serendipitous mechanism for directly sharing media objects among a local community of wireless users. This localized sharing is attractive when wide area network connectivity is undesirable, expensive or unavailable; especially when the shared media objects are large. With some restrictions, such localized sharing of media objects is also acceptable to content owners. However, localized sharing has to contend with far fewer media providers who may also not offer the variety of objects available from wide-area services. We collected empirical data from the widely deployed Apple iTunes application for our analysis. We showed that users are already making a significant amount of media objects available for serendipitous sharing. Our analysis showed that the shared object annotations exhibited a Zipfian long tail distribution. The availability patterns of wireless iTunes users and the object annotations makes serendipitous sharing inappropriate for scenarios that require access to a specific object. Instead, mechanisms that allow the user to specify classes of interesting objects are better suited for such users. Also, given the smaller scale of these systems, serendipitous sharing can benefit from approaches that allow users to disseminate a compact representation of their shared objects. Though the wireless user availability rates was not as high as what was observed in a corporate desktop setting, a large fraction of the users showed high temporal consistency. This allows for high availability with reasonable replication during weekday daytime hours. We answer important questions regarding the viability of a campus-wide media sharing system.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
        ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 7, Issue 1
        January 2011
        158 pages
        ISSN:1551-6857
        EISSN:1551-6865
        DOI:10.1145/1870121
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2011 ACM

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 4 February 2011
        • Accepted: 1 October 2009
        • Revised: 1 May 2009
        • Received: 1 October 2008
        Published in tomm Volume 7, Issue 1

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