A Presentation Layer Mechanism for Multimedia Playback Mobility in Service Oriented Architectures

This paper presents a new approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer. We argue that in the realm of service oriented architectures, such as telecom operator networks, this approach is not the best solution for media playback. Our mechanism presents an alternative to the traditional approach, recognising the fact that a user is connected to a media presentation, which, may be composed of multiple sessions. The advantages of our system are i) Lower network control plane overhead, thus reducing chances of presentation consistency loss ii) Lower network data overhead due to lesser need for transcoding iii) Delegating presentation consistency issues, such as inter-media synchronisation, to the media player iv) Dynamically adapting the presentation to the new target devices without transcoding. At the end of this paper we present experimental results, showing a comparison with previous approaches.