<title>Session mobility support for multimedia applications</title>

Abstract

While current work in multimedia session mobility has usually been concerned with maintaining the network connection of a mobile client, we believe that session hand-off between terminal devices or service providers is essential as well. The ability to simultaneously utilize multiple display devices permits the evolution of new application scenarios that will ease the restrictions of session playback on a portable multimedia device. At the same time, the ability to transparently re-bind a multimedia service provider, as we shall show, allows the system to scale well with respect to the number of mobile clients, and will improve utilization of the broad-band network infrastructure of the future.In this paper, we consider the problem of providing multimedia services to mobile clients, from the viewpoint of designing applications and systems that support session mobility. We present a software architecture for multimedia services that supports session hand-off between service providers, and allows operating parameters of all components of the session to be altered as part of the hand-off. We describe a user interface that simplifies initiating session mobility, while taking into consideration display device capability. We discuss the system support that is necessary, and describe the implementation of our ideas within our software architecture.

Software architecture and media processing considerations

“…Since nearby devices and services are associated with a wireless cell, portable devices utilize those services; associated with the wireless cell in which they are located. A database that contains the service association is maintained in the base-station associated with the wireless cell [8]. The GUI in Figure 3 shows accessible display devices as icons in the data landscape.…”