Selective Mobility Support of Multi-User Services in Wireless Environments

Multicast mobility management is a challenging and unsolved task for the successful deployment of multi-user real-time multimedia services in next generation mobile networks. Therefore, a solution that constrains losses during handover and limits the service degradation perceived by users is needed. Moreover, the losses should be constrained taking in consideration the impact that different packets have in the quality of the multimedia session. In this paper, the seamless mobility of users for media distribution services (SEMUD) proposal takes in account this fact when constraining packet losses that result from the handover process. This leads to an augmented capability to provide seamless mobility for multi-user services. This ability is evaluated by comparing the quality of a received video sequence with and without taking into consideration the different importance that packets have in the quality of the sequence. The results attest for the quality improvement of the video sequence when the packets are handled taking in consideration their importance.