Effective adaptation decisions based on context-aware proactive handoff for mobile multimedia continuity maintenance

The provisioning of multimedia streaming towards wireless mobile devices, even while they change their point/technology to access the Internet, is of growing relevance in the converged mobile world. Several technical challenges have to be faced for seamlessly supporting horizontal/vertical handoffs without interrupting on-going service sessions and without endangering service continuity. The paper specifically focuses on innovative techniques to rapidly take proper content adaptation decisions in case of vertical handoffs. To avoid service interruptions, we originally adopt a combination of context-aware proactive management based on vertical handoff predictions and of innovative multiple-criteria decisions that effectively exploit user/device profiling and multimedia adaptor descriptions. These original techniques are implemented in a support facility integrated in our mobile multimedia middleware and available for download. The reported experimental results, collected in a real testbed at our university, demonstrate the suitability of the proposed approach.