A presentation layer mechanism for multimedia playback mobility in service oriented architectures

This paper presents an approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer for live broadcasting or conferencing sessions. We argue that in the realm of service oriented architectures, such as telecom operator networks, this approach does not take full advantage of the particular case of media playback. Our mechanism presents an alternative to the traditional approach, which i) Lowers network control plane overhead, thus reducing chances of presentation consistency loss ii) Lowers network data overhead due to lesser need for transcoding iii) Delegates presentation consistency issues, such as inter-media synchronisation, to the media player iv) Dynamically adapts the presentation to the new target devices without transcoding. Finally, we present experimental results which show that our approach is implementable in acceptable time bounds.