Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Seamless User-Level Handoff in Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Advancing mobile computing technologies are enabling “ubiquitous personal computing environment”. In this paper, we focus on an important problem in such environment: user mobility. In the case of user mobility, a user is free to access his/her personalized service at anytime, anywhere, through any possible mobile/fixed devices. Providing mobility support in this scenario poses a series of challenges. The most essential problem is to preserve the user's access to the same service despite changes of the accessing host or service provider. Existing system-level mobility solutions are insufficient to address this issue since it is not aware of the application semantics. On the other hand, making each application to be mobility-aware will greatly increase the development overhead. We argue that the middleware layer is the best place to address this problem. On one hand, it is aware of application semantics. On the other hand, by building application-neutral mobility functions in the middleware layer, we eliminate the need to make each application mobility-aware. In this paper, we design a middleware framework to support user mobility in the ubiquitous computing environment. Its major mobility functions include user-level handoff management and service instantiation across heterogeneous computing platforms. We validate the major mobility functions using our prototype middleware system, and test them on two multimedia applications (Mobile Video Player and Mobile Audio Player). To maximally approximate the real-world user-mobility scenario, we have conducted experiments on a variety of computing platforms and communication paradigms, ranging from T1-connected high-end PC to handheld devices with wireless networks. The results show that our middleware framework is able to provide efficient user mobility support in the heterogeneous computing environment.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. “Air ID system,” in http://www.pcprox.com/.

  2. G. Appenzeller, K. Lai, P. Maniatis, M. Roussopoulos, E. Swierk, X. Zhao, and M. Baker, “The mobile people architecture,” ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review, Vol. 1,No. 2, 1999.

  3. H. Balakrishnan, S. Seshan, and R. Katz, “Improving reliable transport and handoff performance in cellular wireless networks,” ACM Wireless Networks, Vol. 1,No. 4, pp. 279–289, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  4. B. Brumitt, B. Meyers, J. Krumm, A. Kern, and S. Shafer, “EasyLiving: Technologies for intelligent environments,” in Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing '00, 2000.

  5. S. Cheshire and M. Baker, “Internet mobility 4×4,” in ACM SIGCOMM '96, 1996.

  6. E. de Lara, D.S. Wallach, and W. Zwaenepoel, “Puppeteer: Component-based adaptation for mobile computing,” in Proceedings of SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN'02), 2002.

  7. A. Fox, S. Gribble, Y. Chawathe, and E. Brewer, “Adapting to network and client variation using active proxies: Lessons and perspectives,” IEEE Personal Communications, 1998.

  8. X. Fu, W. Shi, A. Akkerman, and V. Karamcheti, “CANS: Composable, adaptive network services infrastructure,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '01), 2001.

  9. “GAIA: Active space for ubiquitous computing,” in http://devius.cs.uiuc.edu/gaia.

  10. C.K. Hess and R.H. Campbell, “Media streaming protocol: An adaptive protocol for the delivery of audio and video over the internet,” in ICMCS '99, 1999.

  11. T.D. Hodes, S.E. Czerwinski, B.Y. Zhao, A.D. Joseph, and R.H. Katz, “An architecture for secure wide-area service discovery,” Wireless Networks, Vol. 8, pp. 213–230, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  12. D. Hull, A. Shankar, K. Nahrsted, and J. Liu, “An end-to-end QoS model and management architecture,” in Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Middleware for Distributed Real-time Systems and Services, 1997.

  13. D. Johnson, “Scalable support for transparent mobile host internetworking,” Mobile Computing, 1996.

  14. B. Johanson, S. Ponnekanti, C. Sengupta, and A. Fox, “Multibrowsing: Moving web content across multiple displays,” in UBICOMP '01, 2001.

  15. D.A. Maltz and P. Bhagwat, “MSOCKS: An architecture for transport layer mobility,” in IEEE Infocom '98, 1998.

  16. B. Noble, M. Satyanarayanan, D. Narayanan, J.E. Tilton, J. Flinn, and K. Walker, “Agile application-aware adaptation for mobility,” in Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP '97), 1997.

  17. R. Orr and G. Abowd, “The smart floor: A mechanism for natural user identification and tracking,” in Proceedings of the 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '00), 2000.

  18. C. Perkins, “IPv4 mobility support,” Request for Comments 2002, 2002.

  19. C. Perkins and D. Johnson, “Route optimization in mobile IP,” in Internet Draft Work in Progress, 2000.

  20. N.B. Priyantha, A.K.L. Miu, H. Balakrishnan, and S. Teller, “The cricket compass for context-aware mobile applications,” in Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM '01), 2001.

  21. B. Raman, R.H. Katz, and A.D. Joseph, “Universal Inbox: Providing extensible personal mobility and service mobility in an integrated communication network,” in Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA'00), 2000.

  22. S. Roy, Bo Shen, and V. Sundaram, “Application level hand-off support for mobile media transcoding sessions,” in NOSSDAV '02, 2002.

  23. M. Roussopoulos, P. Maniatis, E. Swierk, K. Lai, G. Appenzeller, and M. Baker, “Person-level routing in the mobile people architecture,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems (USITS '99), 1999.

  24. H. Schulzrinne, S. Casner, R. Frederick, and V. Jacobson, “RTP: A transport protocol for real-time applications,” Request For Comments 1889, 1996.

  25. H. Schulzrinne and E. Wedlund, “Application-layer mobility tsing SIP,” ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review, Vol. 1,No. 2, 1999.

  26. M. Shankar, M. DeMiguel, and J. Liu, “An end-to-end QoS management architecture,” in Proceedings of Real-Time Applications Symposium (RTAS '99), 1999.

  27. A. Snoeren and H. Balakrishnan, “An end-to-end approach to host mobility,” in Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom '99), 1999.

  28. Sun Microsystems, “Jini technology specifications,” http://www.sun.com/jini/specs/.

  29. V. Talwar, “A QoS-aware, secure architecture for supporting user identification and user mobility,” Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.

  30. L. Wang, “MobAudio: Architecture of distributed audio on demand services with user mobility support,” Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.

  31. H.J. Wang, B. Raman, C. Chuah, R. Biswas, R. Gummadi, B. Hohlt, X. Hong, E. Kiciman, Z. Mao, J.S. Shih, L. Subramannian, B.Y. Zhao, A.D. Joseph, and R.H. Katz, “ICEBERG: An Internet-core network architecture for inregrated communication,” IEEE Personal Communications, Special Issue on IP-based Mobile Telecommunication Networks, 2000.

  32. R. Want, A. Hopper, V. Falcao, and J. Gibbons, “The active badge location system,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 10,No. 1, pp. 91–102, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  33. A. Ward, A. Jones, and A. Hopper, “A new location technique for the active office,” IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 4,No. 5, pp. 42–47, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  34. E. Wedlund and H. Schulzrinne, “Mobility support using SIP,” Request For Comments 2543, 1999.

  35. J. Werb and C. Lanzl, “Designing a positioning system for finding things and people indoors,” IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 35,No. 9, pp. 71–78, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  36. D. Xu and K. Nahrstedt, “Finding service paths in a media service proxy network,” in Proceedings of SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN '02), 2002.

  37. D. Xu, K. Nahrstedt, and D. Wichadakul, “MeGaDiP: A wide-area media gateway discovery protocol,” in Proceedings of IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC '00), 2000.

  38. D. Xu, K. Nahrstedt, and D. Wichadakul, “QoS-aware discovery of wide-area distributed services,” in Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid '01), 2001.

  39. Bo Zou, “Mobile ID protocol: A badge-activated application level handoff of a multimedia streaming to support user mobility,” Master's Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Yi Cui & Klara Nahrstedt

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Dongyan Xu

Authors
  1. Yi Cui
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Klara Nahrstedt
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dongyan Xu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cui, Y., Nahrstedt, K. & Xu, D. Seamless User-Level Handoff in Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery. Multimedia Tools and Applications 22, 137–170 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MTAP.0000011932.28891.a0

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MTAP.0000011932.28891.a0

Search

Navigation