Hierarchical control structure for provisioning N-screen services in mobile operator network

In this paper, we propose hierarchical control architecture and request routing mechanisms to support N-Screen services and mobility of both sources and devices in heterogeneous networks. N-Screen services enable users to manage their active sessions among multiple devices having different capabilities, access networks and locations. To support N-Screen services in mobile operator networks, we introduce new functions that maintain the list of active devices with their sessions and network parameters for efficient N-Screen session management. The system supports the terminal and personal mobility of both the sources and devices without affecting the overall multicast connections and minimizes the service disruption. We propose a hierarchical structure for request routing and content sharing that tries to add a user to an active session locally first. The system offloads the backhaul and core networks traffic by localized session adaptation and sharing and improves the scalability issue of existing centralized mobile network architecture. We focus on the physical placement of the new nodes and mechanisms for request routing. Simulation results show that the use of hierarchical adaptation nodes in mobile operator networks can significantly reduce network latency and traffic, and improve the system throughput.