Cross-layer architecture for adaptive real-time multimedia in heterogeneous network environment

Despite the interest, the utilization of today´s networking environment including a variety of access technologies and various services and capabilities is still minimal. Multiaccess mobile devices already on the market provide a capability to hand over the heterogeneous networks but so far there has not been any commonly approved way to efficiently capitalize on this feature. Media Independent Handover Services standard specified by the IEEE 802.21 working group is expected to establish the basis for heterogeneous handovers. Although IEEE 802.21 has usage also beyond heterogeneous handovers, its capabilities do not fulfill all the requirements of adaptive multimedia transmission. For example, upper layer events and end-to-end traffic control communication are outside the scope of IEEE 802.21. In this study, we introduce an information service architecture for adaptive multimedia which enables to collect and disseminate events and information from the different layers of the protocol stack locally and also between network entities regardless of their location in the network. Our architecture presents a Triggering Engine on top of the IEEE 802.21 services in order to introduce upper layer events, flexibility to event distribution, and end-to-end event based signaling to adaptive multimedia transmission.