Dynamic Adaptation of Multimedia Presentations for Videoconferencing in Application Mobility

Abstract

Application mobility is the paradigm where users can move their running applications to heterogeneous devices in a seamless manner. This mobility involves dynamic context changes of hardware, network resources, user environment, and user preferences. In order to continue multimedia processing under these context changes, applications need to adapt not only the collection of media streams, i.e., multimedia presentation, but also their internal configuration to work on different hardware. We present the performance analysis to adapt a videoconferencing prototype application in a proposed adaptation control loop to autonomously adapt multimedia pipelines. Results show that the time spent to create an adaptation plan and execute it is in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. The reconfiguration of pipelines, compared to building them from scratch, is approximately 1000 times faster when re-utilizing already instantiated hardware-dependent components. Therefore, we conclude that the adaptation of multimedia pipelines is a feasible approach for multimedia applications that adhere to application mobility.