Mobility management for multimedia services in heterogeneous environments

Abstract

Nowadays, the wireless access network infrastructure is growing at an accelerated pace. In the current environment which consists of a multitude of wireless networks, live migration of multimedia streaming between different types of connectivity offers important advantages for mobile users. In this paper we provide the description of efficient mobility service architecture for multimedia environments. The proposed architecture handles multimedia streaming adaptation, session management, and takes into consideration user profiles and a set of quality of service criteria. Session management in a mobile environment also implies that a handover mechanism must be used in order to ensure session continuity when a user moves from one network to another. Our architecture supports handover at the application layer, which offers a better quality control than the majority of mobility solutions. In order to demonstrate the performance of our mobility solution, we analyse results from different test scenarios.