VOD services for mobile wireless devices

Wireless devices are becoming very popular and powerful enough to be commonly adopted to access distributed services. More and more sophisticated applications are being developed and a very promising market is quickly being established where mobile users may access multimedia data while roaming from a cell to another, anytime and everywhere. Such scenario requires a strong infrastructure in order to adequately manage all the different issues related with high level service provisioning. QoS represents one of the most crucial issues as it involves many different aspects and directly impacts the user satisfaction. In order to achieve this target, we propose an architecture which allows mobile devices to access advanced services available in the wired part of the network. This architecture, based on mobile agents technology, assumes the presence of a VOD Virtual Server. The strategy adopted is to hide all the basic mechanisms inside a middleware layer that provides the necessary interfaces to allow a simple interaction between the user on the one side and the network and the distributed services on the other. The overall architecture, that is currently being implemented and tested, has been used as an experimental environment to provide mobile users with a new service to access MPEG-4 flows.