A P2P Platform for Collaborative Aggregated Multimedia Sharing

Peer-to-peer technologies have emerged as a powerful and scalable communication model for large scale content shar-ing. However, they are not yet provided with optimized heterogeneous aggregated content management functionality since they lack rich semantic specifications. To overcome these shortcomings, we elaborated a reference model of P2P architecture for a dynamic aggregation, sharing and retrieval of heterogeneous multimedia contents (simple or aggre-gated). This architecture was mainly developed under the CAM4Home European research project and is fully based on the CAM4Home semantic metadata model. This semantic model relies on RDF (Resource Description Framework) and is rich (but simple enough), extensible and dedicated for the description of any kind of multimedia content.In this paper, we detail and evaluate an original semantic-based community network architecture for heterogeneous multimedia con-tent sharing and retrieval. Within the presentedarchitecture, multimedia contents are managed according to their asso-ciated CAM4Home semantic metadata through a structured P2P topology. This topology relies on a semantically en-hanced DHT (Distributed Hash Table) and is also provided with an additional indexing system for offering semantic storage and search facilities and overcoming the problem of exact match keywords in DHTs.