SASHA—A Quality-Oriented Handover Algorithm for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

Abstract

The convergence of the existing network access technologies to a common IP-based architecture and the increase in popularity of accessing video content over the Internet makes IPTV a promising solution for media and entertainment industries. Additionally, video content delivery to the increasingly popular mobile devices over heterogeneous wireless networks makes IPTV even more appealing. However the distribution of multimedia content over heterogeneous wireless networks to mobile devices involves significant technical challenges related to mobility management and quality of service provisioning. The existing solutions do not consider quality of service as a decision making parameter for mobility management in general and handover management in particular.This paper proposes the Smooth Adaptive Soft Handover Algorithm (SASHA), a novel quality-aware approach to handover based on load balancing among different networks using a comprehensive, Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS), function for decision making. SASHA represents the handover management solution at the core of the more comprehensive Multimedia Mobility Management System (M3S), a quality oriented mobility management framework for multimedia applications which maximizes user perceived quality by efficiently exploiting all available communication resources.Simulation-based testing results are presented, outlining the performance of SASHA in different mobility scenarios. The evaluation is performed for different number of nodes performing handover simultaneous and for various situations in terms of networks' overlapping area. The results shown indicate how SASHA outperforms other three mobility management solutions in terms of quality, scalability and resilience to the dynamics of the networks' overlapping area.

Objective Video Quality Assessment Methods: A Classification, Review, and Performance Comparison

“…The temporal masking factor is derived as a function of motion content, based on the ability of the HVS to tolerate distortions at a particular pixel location due to large motion. The blockiness is measured as a function of the MSE of 4 4 blocks between the original and distorted video frames. Finally, the content fidelity factor provides a measure of content richness, based on the tendency of the HVS to provide higher subjective scores for vivid content.…”

“…T HE advent of high performance video compression standards [1]- [3] in conjunction with efficient and ubiquitous transmission systems [4]- [8], and a myriad of consumer video technologies have brought the contemporary world closer to digital videos than ever before. According to recent forecasts, e.g., [9], video transmitted to and from mobile devices will account for 66% of the global mobile data traffic by 2014.…”

Quality of service provision in mobile multimedia - a survey

“…It considers the context information, power consumption, user preferences, and network conditions. The cross-layer handover scheme proposed in [61] tries to balance the load among different networks. It achieves the maximization of the overall system QoS and user perceived QoE by efficiently utilizing the available communication resources.…”

M3S - multimedia mobility management and load balancing in wireless broadcast networks

“…To maximize efficiency, cost (Cost), power efficiency (PEff) and user preferences (UPref) grades are also included. More details about QMS and its components are presented in [7]. For maximum efficiency and flexibility weights are associated with each component.…”