Always best served and managed : research challenges in future mobile multimedia application architectures

Demands from users of future generation networks will include seamless access to services across multiple wireless access networks. Handsets and laptops will typically be equipped with several network interfaces and have enough computing power and battery capacity to connect to several access networks simultaneously within and over administrative domains in a multi-homed manner.Existing technologies and solutions solve parts of the problems raised in such a scenario. However, a remaining important research challenge that still needs to be solved is to find an optimal mobility management solution offering terminal mobility as well as session, service, and personal mobility. Furthermore, a uniform and scalable mechanism for quality of service provisioning needs to be defined and integrated in an overall architecture offering differentiated handling of real-time and non real-time flows. The architecture will be based on the Internet Protocol as its least common denominator, but there are still a lot of research questions to be answered.This article surveys existing solutions and outlines future work in the area of cross-layer designed mobility management solutions and integrated quality of service support using a cross-layer design and policy-based approach.Godkänd; 2007; 20070413 (karand