Application-Level Middleware to Proactively Manage Handoff in Wireless Internet Multimedia

New deployment scenarios tend to consider the requirement of session continuity for service provisioning, especially multimedia streaming, to limited heterogeneous portable devices roaming among wireless localities. In particular, multimedia streaming should not experience any interruption while clients roam in wired-wireless integrated networks based on the standard best-effort Internet. The paper proposes an application-level middleware approach to proactively overcome Wi-Fi handoff and maintain multimedia session continuity in the wireless Internet by exploiting mobile proxies running on the wired network. Mobile middleware proxies locally support resource-limited clients, avoid packet losses during handoffs, pre-fetch local buffers with multimedia contents before handoff occurrence, and possibly reconfigure/renegotiate ongoing sessions after handoffs. Experimental results show that, notwithstanding the application-level implementation, mobile proxies can avoid streaming discontinuities with good efficiency in wireless-wired integrated networks even if their pro-activity is based on simple and lightweight handoff prediction techniques.