MPEG-21 session mobility for heterogeneous devices

Nowadays, multimedia is becoming an important part of our live. Every day, the number of people that are having multimedia experiences is augmenting. To allow this growth in multimedia experiences, a new set of devices has been developed. Each of those devices has different terminal and network capabilities, or even different functionalities. As a result of this growing variety of devices, more and more people tend to use several devices for multimedia consumption. Having a wide set of devices for multimedia experiences, results in a demand for seamless switching between devices, better known as session mobility. In this paper, we discuss how session mobility can be realized between heterogeneous devices using MPEG-21 technology. First, we give an overview of the difficulties that occur when doing session mobility between heterogeneous devices. After this problem statement, we give a detailed discussion on how to overcome those difficulties by using MPEG-21. Throughout this paper, we will demonstrate how different parts of MPEG-21 can be integrated into a complete MPEG-21 compliant multimedia framework that facilitates session mobility between heterogeneous devices.