Poster Papers

Track: Systems

Paper Title:
Web4CE: Accessing Web-based Applications on Consumer Devices

Authors:

Walter Dees (Philips Research)
Paul Shrubsole (Philips Research)

Abstract:
In a world where all devices will be interconnected, the boundaries between the different devices will start to disappear. Devices will be able to access each others applications; sessions can be suspended on one device and resumed on another device; devices can serve as each others input and output device, and all devices will be able to connect to the Internet. This will give true mobility to the user as he/she will not be restricted to the time and location where he/she accesses an application.

Of course, we need a variety of different mechanisms and technologies to enable this, such as:

An infrastructure for discovering client and servers in a network.
Remote rendering of UIs on other devices in the network.
Mechanisms to exchange capability information between devices, and to adapt the UI based on these capabilities.
Mechanisms to deal with session migration.
Support for a wide range of consumer devices, ranging from mobile phones to high-end TVs.

This requires technologies that cross different domains, i.e. the PC domain, mobile domain, and TV domain. Several major companies within these different domains have decided to work together on these issues. One of the results is a framework for remote user interfaces for both UPnP networks and the Internet. This framework is called Web4CE (a.k.a. CEA-2014) [1], and has been accepted as the baseline remote user interface technology within the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) [2], which is a large industry-wide effort for creating true interoperability between network-enabled devices.

This paper provides a short overview of the Web4CE framework, and some of the use cases that it enables.

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