TINA-based environment for mobile multimedia services

This paper discusses how mobility can be incorporated into TINA services. Mobility in this context is the ability to transfer a session from one terminal to another without disrupting the service. The design, implementation and example of use of a “mobility-aware” TINA distributed processing environment (DPE) is detailed in the paper. The DPE is built over commercial software products and offers two basic facilities from which TINA services can be built: life-cycle and stream facilities. Life-cycle facilities allow distributed objects to be deployed and managed transparently while stream facilities allow multimedia channels to be established among service components. Life-cycle facilities are implemented according to the reference model for open distributed processing (RM-ODP). Stream facilities are based on the Object Management Group´s media streaming framework “control and management of audio/video streams (A/V streams)”. Mobility in our DPE is implemented at the cluster level as prescribed by RM-ODP. An extension of the A/V streams framework is proposed in order to re-establish the media flows after cluster migration. Finally, a TINA-based mobile multimedia service is built over life-cycle and stream facilities using TINA service architecture concepts and guidelines