Multiparty Session and Network Resource Control in the Context Casting (C-CAST) Project

The increasing demand in personalized multimedia group services imposes stringent and heterogeneous requirements, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed through legacy architectures. In future scenarios, context-awareness and multicast will together drive new trends, since situations in which users share the same interests and request similar services can be exploit allowing efficient session/network control. However, context-awareness also introduce challenges, where any change to context, such as, location, mobility, velocity, preferences, presence, can change the overall services and network environments, thus requiring to dynamically restructure network and multicast sessions, which can pose scalability problems. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for context-aware multiparty session and network control which adapts to contexts’ and networks’ dynamics and maintains the connectivity with the expected requirements over session lifetime. In addition to dynamic session and network control driven by context, we introduce abstract trees to increase stability of network to any change. The practical scenarios studied in the paper demonstrate that such paradigm tends to be a very essential approach for the future Internet where unpredictable variables make the diverse users Quality of Experience (QoE) harder to satisfy.