User-centric mobility management for multimedia content access

Abstract

Current mobility protocols and architectures aremainly targeted to devices or applications and they usually lack the ability to support user-centric paradigms; moreover, they usually face a single aspect of the problem, i.e., terminal handover or session mobility. Full mobility support is only available to specific applications or protocols (e.g., SIP) but these approaches do not exploit all facilities for movement detection at the network/link layers and do not allow to use the same framework for different applications. This paper proposes a generic mobility framework for terminal handover and session migration. It pursues the user-centric paradigm and builds a cross-layer architecture, yielding to a high level of generality, applicability and flexibility. Unlike other approaches, it does not require any modification in correspondent peers and works with a minimal network infrastructure. Software implementations are described for two representative real-time multimedia applications, i.e., media streaming and interactive conference. The effectiveness of the framework was analyzed by means of both performance measurements in local and Internet testbeds and user evaluation during a live demo conducted at a national science exhibitio

User-oriented seamless service handoff in the ubiquitous computing environment

“…In the user-oriented seamless service handoff scenario, the goal of our work is to keep the user’s logical service environment despite changes in the physical environment (Bolla et al , 2004; Cui and Xu, 2004). The service environment includes the user’s current client host, service provider, the service he or she is accessing, etc.…”

“…Recently, a variety of user-oriented services such as internet protocol television (IPTV), video-on-demand (VoD) and “Follow Me” multimedia services are considered to be prosperous in the ubiquitous computing environment (Bolla et al , 2004; Parra et al , 2009; Cui and Xu, 2004; ICEBERG project, 2001; Takasugi et al , 2003; Han et al , 2009). China has proposed the “Broadband China” project, which will speed up the pace of deploying the next generation of the internet in China.…”

“…In the user-oriented scenario, the multimedia content comes along with the user. Users can maintain their access to their personalized services uninterrupted even when moving or changing terminals and service providers (Bolla et al , 2004; Cui and Xu, 2004). This means that the user, instead of the client host, is the real end receiver of any service.…”