Infoshare : Design and Implementation of Scalable Multimedia Signage Architecture for Wireless Ubiquitous Environments

Abstract

Digital signage systems have found many interesting applications in the realms of advertising, entertainment and education. One of the most prevalent challenging issues faced by current Local Area Network (LAN) based Digital signage network architectures is that their difficulty in porting to wireless ubiquitous environments. While popularity of wireless LANs promotes such architectural improvement, Traditional thin/thick client based architectures suffer inefficiency and scalability issues introduced by use of proprietary signage content formats. Use of such content formats to store signage contents is less optimal since it could lead to content redundancy, difficulty in creating, managing signage contents and scalability issues. As a solution for this issue we propose a Smart Client based digital signage architecture that uses XAML (an XML based declarative GUI language) contents for expressing its signage displays. While Smart Clients can better tolerate communication disruptions which are quite frequent in wireless environments, use of XAML based open content format promotes use of simple tools and variety of devices for signage content creation and management over the Internet in a ubiquitous environment. We successfully applied this generic architecture to a prototype digital signage system called Infoshare and report its robustness in withstanding network disruptions. We evaluate the easiness of editing XAML based signage contents by comparing Infoshare with a popular LAN based digital signage system which uses proprietary content formats. We demonstrate scalability of Infoshare signage service in terms of hardware resources by deploying it in different hardware platforms.