UMOST : Ubiquitous Multimedia Framework for Context-Aware Session Mobility

With the increasing use of small portable devices and wireless networks, a trend to support computing on the move has emerged. This trend is referred to as 'anytime/anywhere computing' for mobility support. In particular, multimedia service with heterogeneous devices, location-free access and user-context awareness is still a very active and evolving field of research in broad areas. In this paper, a movable multimedia framework, namely UMOST(ubiquitous middleware of streaming technology), is proposed for multimedia session mobility. It provides various levels of quality of service management, as well as seamless user-level handoffs using MPEG-21 digital item adaptation (DIA). It serves scalable streaming adaptive to the user, and deploys a back-end content distribution network for adapting dynamically to environmental changes through prefetching. The implemented framework employs a smart space aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of multimedia session mobility..