A novel low-power RF4CE-based communication framework for multimedia system control

A remote control (RC) is a component that operates electronic devices wirelessly issuing commands to consumer electronics (CE). Such existing RC solutions are based mainly on the infrared radiation (IR) technology with a line-of-sight barrier and they lack various additional features such as bi-directional and richer communications, low-power consumption, and no line-of-sight barriers which are needed for the flexibility and interoperability of more intelligent new CE devices on the market. In this paper, we propose a novel low-power RF4CE-based communication framework (RCF) for Multimedia System Control in order to overcome many constraints of IR-based legacy solutions and support energy-efficient multimedia communications. The proposed RCF framework is designed for multimedia control communication using smart phones, adopting the RF4CE protocol which is a de facto radio frequency standard for CE remote control solutions. The analysis of energy consumption and two verification scenarios (one for CE control and the other for contents sharing), including the use of various CEs and smart phones, show that our proposed RCF framework provides good practical usage in terms of content-sharing and smart CE control.