Migration approaches to support nomadic services for communities

Research carried out in the context of the CONTENT Network of Excellence aims at investigating novel paradigms for the provision of AV services to user communities by means of self-organizing overlays and hybrid Content Delivery Networks. Being in the age of mobile telecommunications, the CONTENT architectural framework cannot ignore that an increasing number of users require access to such services by means of mobile devices and in mobility. While a considerable effort is now being made to introduce support for mobility in ordinary communication protocols, e.g. by introducing fast and efficient handoff mechanisms, little work has been done to investigate the possibility and the opportunity to migrate services when the users change their connection to the network, e.g. by switching from a GPRS connection to a public WiFi hotspot. In this paper we present a preliminary investigation aimed at comparing different migration mechanisms that can be considered to support service migration in the context of a CONTENT Service Network.