ABSTRACT
Lately, streaming real-time multimedia content over the Internet has been gaining momentum in the communications, entertainment, music, and interactive game industries. Real-time applications include interactive services such as IP telephony, multiplayer games, and streaming services such as broadcasting multimedia content, multiparty conferences, and collaborations. Multimedia streaming applications are far more demanding in terms of bandwidth, latency, and reliability than traditional TCP/IPbased applications and are thus ideal drivers for the next-generation Internet. In addition, they may require multicast support to provide flexibility and take care of bandwidth bottlenecks. As personal communication and ubiquitous access become more important, it is necessary to come up with flexible network technologies that can support multiple applications such as Mobile IP telephony, multimedia, and other streaming applications over a wireless IP network. To support multimedia applications for roaming users over the wireless Internet one has to consider several factors such as signaling, registration, configuration, quality of service, bandwidth management, mobility management, and authentication, among others. Thus, it is desirable to design a mobility management framework that can take care of location management, quality of service, and end-to-end security while providing personal, session, service, and
terminal mobility features to the end users. In this chapter, we highlight some of the mobility management mechanisms and describe an application-
layer framework that helps provide the desired roaming features over a heterogeneous access network. We also provide some experimental results obtained while prototyping this application-layer framework in a mobile multimedia testbed.
