MPEG-21 Session Mobility on Mobile Devices

Since broadband network connections are becoming ubiquitous, people expect access to multimedia content anywhere anytime. This new demand results in a need to create and develop new, powerful devices for multimedia consumption. The new devices, each having their set of network and terminal capabilities, allow transparent access to multimedia and therefore open the path to transparent mobility of multimedia. In this paper we demonstrate how MPEG-21 can be used to provide a solution for session mobility between devices with different terminal and network capabilities. We demonstrate how MPEG-21 Digital Items can be used for realizing session mobility between two different devices and how it can overcome the difficulties of capability differences. The feasibility of the MPEG-21 approach for session mobility is illustrated by the implementation of a demonstrator on the Windows Mobile 2003 and Windows XP platforms. This paper outlines the technical details of the implementation and the results of several performance measurements on both platforms.