Heterogeneous file sharing by file-system emulation
Cherng-Ying Ing, Tzao-Lin Lee · 2008
File sharing among heterogeneous systems is always a pain due to different conventions and file sharing mechanisms involved in both ends. Although the evolving of USB standards and the spread of USB storage devices alleviate the heterogeneous file sharing effort, the performance of the file transferring is degraded due to the bandwidth reduction introduced by the storage technologies and the fact that the amount of data must be transferred twice, i.e., to and from the storage. We propose a file-system emulation based scheme to transfer files across heterogeneous systems easy and fast. It takes the advantage of standard USB storage protocol to achieve driver-less translation layer for the target system. The overall transfer speed is improved by utilizing the file cache of the source system. The actual amount of data is transferred once without temporarily keeping a copy in the intermediate medium. We also mention example applications such as an UPnP file-server adapter and an improved file-sharing cable.