User-centric mobility management for multimedia content access

Current mobility protocols and architectures are mainly targeted to devices or applications and they usually lack the ability to support user-centric paradigms; moreover, they usually face a single aspect of the problem, i.e., terminal handover or session mobility. Full mobility support is only available to specific applications or protocols (e.g., SIP) but these approaches do not exploit all facilities for movement detection at the network/link layers and do not allow to use the same framework for different applications. This paper proposes a generic mobility framework for terminal handover and session migration. It pursues the user-centric paradigm and builds a cross-layer architecture, yielding to a high level of generality, applicability and flexibility. Unlike other approaches, it does not require any modification in correspondent peers and works with a minimal network infrastructure. Software implementations are described for two representative real-time multimedia applications, i.e., media streaming and interactive conference. The effectiveness of the framework was analyzed by means of both performance measurements in local and Internet testbeds and user evaluation during a live demo conducted at a national science exhibition.