Energy-Efficient Mobile Middleware for SIP on Ubiquitous Multimedia Systems

Currently, different technologies provide solutions to successfully resolve the continuity of the service of a mobile host. The employment of a middleware is a common approach to face this issue, supporting also heterogeneity. In addition to the usual requirements of bandwidth, delay, or CPU load, multimedia applications have special features that are still being studied in a mobile scenario, as the intensive energy consumption. Due to all them, current middleware specifications and services do not directly apply. The Session Initialization Protocol (SIP) is the most frequently employed tool to satisfy mobile multimedia requirements. In this paper, we present and validate the design of a service based on middleware and Publish/Subscribe schemes that minimizes the control data exchange introduced by SIP, reducing the energy consumption in the handoff process. It considers all the relevant factors in the audio/video transmission done by different middleware entities, and it supports their profiles (provider or consumer). Using an intermediate element, a modified event server, decouples the communication edges, adding some improvements: asynchronous connection establishment and extension of mobility to all the terminals involved in the connection. The performance offered by the service proposed is also evaluated, and their results further discussed.