Leader-Controlled Real Time and Synchronous Multimedia Presentation for Wireless Mobile Group Touring Services using the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) Technique^*

This work designed an innovative group touring service based on the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture and developed the associated group touring APP called “DEH_Narrator”. The DEH_Narrator APP allows users to form an Mobile Social Network (MSN) group that contains a group leader and some group members. The group leader can (i) share her/his downloaded text and multimedia contents of Point of Interest (POIs) to all of the group members and (ii) control the playout of these shared contents in the handheld devices’ DEH_Narrator APPs of all group members to assist her/his oral explanation work in the group touring scenario. That is, it belongs to the other type of real time and synchronous multimedia presentation because the corresponding multimedia content needs to be displayed to other group members’ handheld devices during the group leader’s oral explanation of the target POI. To meet the requirement of synchronously control and real time’s presenting POI’s multimedia content in all of the group members’ handheld devices, the proposed group touring service adopted the MEC paradigm and architecture, in which a MEC server is associated with a mobile WiFi router, to provide users better quality of service (QoS) in terms of the data transmission time and quality of experience (QoE) in terms of the response time from selecting a POI to displaying the selected POI’s multimedia content to all of the group members’ handheld devices. Experimental results demonstrated that the adoption of the MEC paradigm and architecture can significantly improve the performance, i.e., the response time than without adopting the MEC paradigm and architecture.