User-centric mobility for multimedia communications: Experience and user evaluation from a live demo

Mobility is a common issue in modern communications. Traditionally, terminal devices have been playing a leading role and thus the main interest has been targeted to terminal mobility. However, nowadays people claim and expect pervasive communications, with continuous and seamless media access, regardless of the device they are using. That requires new communication paradigms and mobility solutions, in order to overcome the legacy network- and device-centric approaches. In this paper we discuss our mobility framework for multimedia communications which accounts for both terminal handover and session migration implementing the user-centric paradigm in networking. It basically works at the network layer and requires only minimal application-specific operations, yielding to a high level of generality, applicability and flexibility. To prove this, we apply the mobility framework to the interactive multimedia communication, implementing a Video and Voice over IP application. The mobility framework has been deployed in a real testbed and submitted to user judgment in a live demo at an Italian national science exhibition. We report the qualitative feedback got from users which clearly demonstrates both the feasibility of the proposed solution and the growing attractiveness of communicating in a user-centric fashion.