User-Centric Mobility for Multimedia Communication: Experience and Evaluation from a Live Demo

Nowadays people claim and expect pervasive communications, with continuous and seamless media access; that requires new communication paradigms beyond the legacy network- and device-centric approaches, and leads to the user-centric concept. Mobility is a key issue in pervasive communications, and session migration is the most related aspect with the user-centric vision; however, despite of the fact that the user should be at the center of the system, no evidence of user involvement in the design and evaluation phase can be found in the literature for this topic. In this paper we describe the user evaluation we carried out by a live demo open to a large heterogeneity of potential users at a national science exhibition. Our purpose was twofold: on the one hand, to evaluate users' feeling with our user-centric networking mobility framework based on the concept of Personal Address and, on the other hand, to figure out general indications for the whole research community about user's expectations and requirements for session migration.