US Patent:
20150142919, May 21, 2015
Inventors:
- Raleigh NC, US
Injong Rhee - Apex NC, US
International Classification:
H04L 29/06
Abstract:
Smart devices including smart phones and tablets are getting more powerful and become versatile enough to replace conventional personal computers. Despite the rapid evolution of capabilities of such devices, controlling peripherals such as networked printers is infeasible due to lack of dedicated drivers to communicate with peripherals. To immediately enable smart devices to operate peripherals, a cloud-powered system, CloudBridge, is suggested. A CloudBridge application miming on a smart device works as a TCP bridge relaying packets between two TCP tunnels connected to a networked peripheral on one side and a cloud server on the other side. Through the bridge, issuing operations from a smart device without having drivers becomes possible by asking the cloud server to interpret the operations to a language that the peripheral can understand, CloudBridge further optimizes user experience by using data compression that is adaptively applied by a decision function. The system implemented in Android phones and Linux servers is demonstrated to control networked printers on smart phones and tablets. The decision function is shown to optimize QoE metrics, such as response time and energy consumption though extensive evaluations.