Seamless Mobility of Users with QoS and Connectivity Support

The popularity of mobile devices associated with the growing interest in multi-user real-time sessions, such as IPTV, is foreseen as having a strong impact in the architecture of future heterogeneous networks. An important issue that needs to be solved concerns the capability to provide a seamless experience and an assured quality to the user independently of the connectivity technology supported by the mobile devices and offered by each network along the end-to- end path (e.g., unicast and/or multicast). In this paper, a solution to provide seamless mobility to users with connectivity and Quality of Service (QoS) control is presented. Seamless mobility is achieved through the use of buffers during movement and caches after the handover, and the quality level of the ongoing session is supported by using an end-to-end QoS mapping, QoS adaptation and connectivity control scheme. The obtained results confirm the capability of the proposal to avoid packet losses resulting from handover, and to improve the perceived quality of a received video sequence.