Session Mobility of Multimedia Applications in Home Networks Using UPnP

With the increasing demand for multimedia contents and with the increased usage of small hand-held devices, a user in a home network has a number of devices at hand which may offer similar multimedia services but with varying capabilities. The user may choose one device for using a particular multimedia service at one time, and change to another device at another time. The user may, however, continue using the same service and maintain his previous session on the new device without restarting a new session. In this paper, we describe how UPnP can be used for transferring a multimedia session from a device to another in a home network. The procedure for transfer of session is based on the UPnP audio video architecture. We also describe our prototype implementation.