Collaborative media streaming in an in-home network

Multimedia applications are attractive, especially in home networks where consumer electronics products are more and more integrated into computer networks. As portable devices in combination with wireless local area networks (WLAN) form a reasonable extension to in-home computer networks, multimedia content should be delivered to these devices also. We propose a concept of collaborative media streaming without depending on any special network functionality. In particular, wireless devices can benefit from such application extensions. As we found it important to leave the ability to control streaming at each user, we introduce the concept of association. This concept enables users to share common objects as well as to get an own copy of the stream where applicable.