Automatic multimedia session migration by means of a context-aware mobility framework

Abstract

The availability of a large number of personal, wireless multimedia devices enables the users to benefit multimedia content while moving. A further enhancement is given by the availability of context information (in terms of users' location, environment, etc.) that enables the adaptation of the multimedia content to the context and to the availability of alternative renderers. In this paper, we propose a context-aware mobility framework that supports context-dependent, multimedia interactive applications. This framework manages mobility of multimedia sessions by introducing the concept of Personal Address, that is a network identifier assigned to users and their sessions. The mobility framework also leverages on the concept of context server to interact with heterogeneous context sources on a wide area network. We describe the implementation of this framework for Voice-over-IP sessions and we report the performance results.