Multiparty session and network resource control in the context casting (C-CAST) project

Abstract

The explosive increasing demand of citizens and businesses in multimedia group services, personalization, context-awareness and seamless mobility, imposes stringent and heterogeneous requirements, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed through the traditional transport control architectures for session content delivery. In future scenarios, context-aware services and multicasting will together drive a new trend, since context-awareness can exploit situations in which users share the same interests and request similar services, increasing the effectiveness of session and network control. In these environments, where groups may be created based on context, multicast takes a new lead to the communications environment. However, context-aware networks also introduce personalized concepts: any change to context, such as, location, mobility, velocity, preferences, presence, can change the overall services and network environments, requiring the network and multicast sessions to be completely restructured in a very dynamic way. This dynamicity poses scalability problems in current networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for context-aware multiparty session and network control which dynamically adapts to contexts’ and networks’ dynamics and maintains the connectivity with the expected requirements over session lifetime. We consider the concepts of dynamic session and network control, driven by context, but introduce the concept of abstract trees in the network to increase the stability of the network to any context change. The practical scenarios studied in the paper demonstrate that such a context-aware design paradigm tends to be a very essential approach for the future Internet where unpredictable variables such as user, environment, networks and session contexts make the diverse users Quality of Experience (QoE) harder to satisfy.