Proactive Management of Distributed Buffers for Streaming Continuity in Wired-Wireless Integrated Networks

New challenging deployment scenarios are accommodating limited and heterogeneous portable devices that roam among wireless access localities during service provisioning with session maintenance and continuity requirements, such as in multimedia streaming. That calls for novel middlewares able to dynamically personalize service quality, with no interruptions while clients move in wired-wireless integrated networks at provision time. The paper proposes a middleware-level proactive buffering solution for streaming continuity based on mobile proxies. Mobile proxies execute in the wired network locally to their wireless clients and proactively migrate to maintain colocality with associated roaming devices. In addition, apart from traditional client-side buffering, mobile proxies proactively manage pre-fetching buffers of multimedia contents by dynamically adapting buffer size to the current context such as handoff probability, client/streaming characteristics, and user service class. Experimental results show that, notwithstanding portable Java-based implementation, our context-aware proactive and adaptive buffering does not experience streaming interruptions in most common wireless Internet deployment scenarios