Multimedia Multicast in Mobile Computing: Handoff Management

With rapid technological advances being made in the area of wireless communications it is expected that, in the near future, mobile users will be able to access a wide variety of services such as multicast distribution of multimedia streams. These services are characterized by the integrated processing of different media types, such as audio and video. Different multimedia streams must be played out in a synchronized way. However, due to the asynchronous nature of the communication (packets or radio), some problems can disrupt the synchronization such as delay jitter. In this paper, we present a synchronization protocol for multicast of multimedia streams. It allows a mobile host to playback continuously a multimedia stream. When a mobile host moves from cell to cell, the scheme allows continuous playback. The mechanism used is based on the pre-buffering of media units. We present a computation of the handoff time and a mechanism for the restoration of the initial buffer size. Simulation results show that, when resources are already reserved, the handoff time is bounded and the buffer takes again its initial size.