An Novel Approach to Ubiquitous Mobile Multimedia Communication

Aim of this paper is to propose an application-layer framework for seamless Ubiquitous multimedia communication. Proposed method is based on the Session Initiation Protocol and the Resilient Mobile Socket. The resulting framework provides a better mobility support for distributed multimedia applications. As a part of the proposed framework the paper describes a new handover strategy called Competition-based Soft-Handover Management, which uses simulcast to improve quality of service and to seamlessly hand over multimedia traffic to the network interface that currently offers better network characteristics. In short, during a handover packets are simulcasted through all available network interfaces, and when the packets are received by the remote end-point, they are merged back into one stream. As each network connection competes with other connections in contributing to the merged stream at the remote end-point, the handover process can be viewed as a competition where the connection that contributes most is selected after the handover. As a proof of concept, the framework has been integrated into Marratech, which is a commercially available audio/video group communication application. By using network emulators, the paper demonstrates how the framework can be used to improve QoS, compare end-to-end performance, and perform lossless handovers while reducing redundant packets.