On the analysis of hierarchical autonomic control of multiparty services

The increasing interest in group-based multimedia services, followed by the larger resource demands and the quest for seamless mobility support, have been propelling research on novel approaches capable of overcoming the challenges posed by future networking environments. One of those challenges is heterogeneity, which can also be leveraged in favor of more enriched services through context awareness and thus enhance user service perception. In this article we describe a context-driven framework for multiparty content delivery and discuss the rewards of employing the abstract multiparty transport concept, which provides autonomic control of personalized group-based services to users through a hierarchical strategy. Since scalability is the major concern when dealing with group-based services, we evaluated the framework and its embedded concepts regarding this feature. Herein, we describe an analytical study focused on quantifying the necessary reconfigurations in the network due to any type of context change. The outcomes of this study show that through the concept of abstract multiparty trees, we obtain considerable gains regarding link savings and consequent network control operations, thus increasing the scalability of the autonomic control architecture.