Seamless Mobility Support for Adaptive Applications in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The advancement in wireless networking technologies and portable devices has motivated the explosive interests in heterogeneous wireless environments. However, the mobility and diversity of both devices and users bring new challenges for the design of mobile Internet applications. Seamless mobility support has always been one of the key problems. In this paper, we study context-aware adaptation for multimedia applications to realize seamless mobility support in heterogeneous wireless networks. We identify the new challenges and technical issues, and survey existing solutions with detailed analysis. We find that we still lack of complete mobility support platform for multimedia applications. To fill in this gap, we present the design and implementation of SMART, a Seamless Mobility support middleware platform. SMART can deal with both the change of network and the change of device. Moreover, the reflection technology is employed to achieve reconfigurable adaptation. To demonstrate the usage of SMART, we develop an example application of video conferencing.