Streaming Multimedia Contents to Nomadic Users in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Streaming of multimedia data is a common application in today's Internet. The trend towards ubiquitous computing raises expectations from the users about enjoying multimedia contents everywhere and with any device. However, current protocols for streaming data (e.g., RTSP) have not been designed for this purpose, thus they fail in providing the user with a transparent and seamless media experience in nomadic life. In this paper we propose a framework for multimedia delivery and adaptation in mobile environments. We introduce the concept of personal address (PA), which is a network address associated to the user instead of a network interface; the proposed framework works at the network layer; it moves the PA among networks and devices to deliver media in a seamless and transparent way.