Handoff Management of Wireless Multimedia Services: a Middleware Approach

Advances in wireless networking and content delivery systems are enabling new challenging scenarios. A growing number of users require continuous access to their multimedia services, e.g., audio and video streaming, while moving between different points of attachment to the Internet, possibly with different connectivity technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G cellular). To grant service continuity, it is crucial to dynamically personalize service provisioning to the characteristics of wireless provisioning environment and to smooth possible discontinuities in wireless resource availability during handoff. Among the several solutions proposed in the field, middleware approaches working at the application layer are increasingly demonstrating their effectiveness and applicability. However, a set of common and standardized design guidelines for the development of such middleware infrastructures is still missing. This chapter proposes a general framework to address main handoff-related problems and requirements, identifies main handoff management design guidelines, and presents an extensive survey of state-of-the-art application-layer middlewares for handoff management. The chapter completes by sketching current industry hando® standardization directions and open research issues.