Streaming Session Mobility across Multiple Devices in Mobile IPTV Environments

Since digital media is being combined into all aspects of our lives and an ubiquitous broadband networks are being surfaced, people expect to extend the consumption of these services on any device, anytime and anywhere. This new demand requires the flexible service adaptation to user requirements and to device capabilities. Specifically, various access networks and devices with different capabilities, in Mobile IPTV environments, are used to create and consume across multiple devices in a seamless and transparent way. In order to enhance higher user satisfaction in Mobile IPTV services across heterogeneous devices and access networks, service session mobility and device-based content adaptation are an ingredient. Recently, the realtime streaming protocol (RTSP) has been adopted for steaming by several standards development organization (SDOs) and session initiation protocol (SIP) has been used for multimedia conversational service. Thought several session migration mechanisms based on SIP for conversional service has been proposed, SIP is unfit for the multimedia streaming services since these do not support streaming control functions, such as pause, play, fast forward and rewind. Therefore, this paper addresses the service session migration scenarios in Mobile IPTV environments and describes how to use the RTSP for streaming service session migration between multiple devices, especially session split and session merge across multiple devices.