Mobile teleconferencing: design and performance of handoff management and session multicasting schemes

We address the architectural and protocol enhancements required to support mobile video teleconferencing over ATM-based broadband backbone networks. We focus on two key aspects, namely, handoff management and conference bridging. The former encompasses the capabilities needed to provide transparency for active sessions to the dynamic movement of mobile end-users across switch domains whereas the latter refers to the capabilities and strategies for establishing multipoint-to-multipoint video sessions. We identify a few schemes for handoff rerouting tailored to different degrees of mobility, which can be implemented as part of a mobility management functional layer. We also propose a set of alternatives for providing the video multicast function in an efficient manner, which can be implemented as a session control layer. A performance evaluation of the proposed methodologies, based on a simulation model, is reported along with the key results.