Self-Adaptive Handoff Management for Mobile Streaming Continuity

Self-adaptive management and quality adaptation of multimedia services are open challenges in the heterogeneous wireless Internet, where different wireless access points potentially enable anywhere anytime Internet connectivity. One of the most challenging issues is to guarantee streaming continuity with maximum quality, despite possible handoffs at multimedia provi-sioning time. To enable handoff management to self-adapt to spe-cific application requirements with minimum resource consump-tion, this paper offers three main contributions. First, it proposes a simple way to specify handoff-related service-level objectives that are focused on quality metrics and tolerable delay. Second, it presents how to automatically derive from these objectives a set of parameters to guide system-level configuration about handoff strategies and dynamic buffer tuning. Third, it describes the de-sign and implementation of a novel handoff management infra-structure for maximizing streaming quality while minimizing resource consumption. Our infrastructure exploits i) experimen-tally evaluated tuning diagrams for resource management and ii) handoff prediction/awareness. The reported results show the ef-fectiveness of our approach, which permits to achieve the desired quality-delay tradeoff in common Internet deployment environ-ments, even in presence of vertical handoffs.