2 research outputs found
Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless
communications is stressing the need for the development of
mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services
adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being
aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and
intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless
technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation,
since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is
required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware
architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service
development. The architecture hides technology-specific
mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness
and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most
widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses
motivations and design details in the challenging context of
mobile multimedia streaming applications
Support infrastructures for multimedia services with guaranteed continuity and QoS
Advances in wireless networking and content delivery systems are enabling new challenging provisioning scenarios where a growing number of users access multimedia services, e.g., audio/video streaming, while moving among different points of attachment to the Internet, possibly with different connectivity technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular 3G. That calls for novel middlewares capable of dynamically personalizing service provisioning to the characteristics of client environments, in particular to
discontinuities in wireless resource availability due to handoffs. This dissertation proposes a novel middleware solution, called MUM, that performs effective and context-aware handoff management to transparently avoid service interruptions during both horizontal and vertical handoffs. To achieve the goal, MUM exploits the full visibility of wireless connections available in client localities and their handoff implementations (handoff awareness), of service quality requirements and handoff-related quality degradations (QoS awareness), and of network topology and resources available in current/future localities (location awareness). The design and implementation of the all main MUM components along with extensive on the field trials of the realized middleware architecture confirmed the validity of the proposed full
context-aware handoff management approach. In particular, the reported experimental results demonstrate that MUM can effectively maintain service continuity for a wide range of different multimedia services by exploiting handoff prediction mechanisms, adaptive buffering and pre-fetching techniques, and proactive re-addressing/re-binding