Application level session hand-off management in a ubiquitous multimedia environment

This paper focuses on one of the most important aspects of user mobility in a ubiquitous mobile environment: application session hand-off management. Here we use the term Session Mobility to define the ability of handling application session hand-offs among mobile devices. The paper summarizes the current research in the field and addresses the important facets and the missing "ingredients" of these treatments. We then propose an architecture to support and manage application session transfers based on the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. This takes advantage of Digital Items and adaptation metadata to provide a standards-based approach to the problem. Finally, we validated our framework using a test-bed which provides for dynamic multimedia adaptatio