A user-centric mobility framework for multimedia interactive applications

Abstract

Today users are getting used to have many heterogeneous devices available in their surroundings. This opens great opportunities to build pervasive communication environments. Pervasive communications are usually user-centric in nature, as they should target sessions to users rather than their specific devices. Mobility is a key issue in such context: users often move and that implies different devices and networks to become available to them dynamically. As a matter of fact, terminal handovers and session migrations could negatively impact the enjoyment of multimedia content in such scenarios. In this paper, we propose a user-centric mobility framework for multimedia interactive applications. To this aim, we implement the concept of Personal Address, that is a network identifier assigned to users. Our mobility framework exploits this concept to accounts for all aspects of mobility. Moreover, we describe our deployment for Voice-over-IP sessions; finally, we report the results from our experimental testbed.