Seamless transferring of "work in progress" between devices in a peer to peer environment

Abstract

With the current technical improvements, there is a huge involvement of computational devices in human day today life which leads to a single person using multiple computing devices such as desktop computers, laptops and smartphones. A user often uses the same set of applications on each device and switches among devices according to the availability, convenience and requirement rather than carrying a single device everywhere. When the user wants to switch between devices and continue his work, he has to transfer the “work in progress” between devices. The most basic way for transferring this work is to pause the current task, transfer the data to the target device as a file, locate it on the target device, open it using a suitable application and then manually restore the previous work state. There are many technologies and applications that support transferring or synchronizing data and “work in progress” between devices. However, they depend on the availability of an intermediate service provider to facilitate such transfer. This research designs a framework which focuses on reducing the human involvement in transferring “work in progress” between two devices and also doing it without involving a third party. For this we transfer both application state and the application data. The state information represents the current state of the application which is needed to resume the “work in progress” at the target device end without user interaction. A proof of concept desktop application, VLC WIP Migrator (VLC Work In Progress Migrator), which transfers audio/video content between two Windows laptop computers is also described. The current play time of the audio/video file is considered as the state information and socket communication is used to transfer the files between devices. The time to resume the audio/video playing via VLC WIP Migrator is compared with the time taken to transfer the same audio/video file using “Nearby sharing”, a built-in application in Windows 10. The test results show that transferring via VLC WIP Migrator is both more convenient and quicker.