Handover in future wireless communication systems must be seamless. Current IP-level mobility protocols have difficulties meeting the stringent handover delay requirements. At the same time they do not give sufficient control to the network to optimize the handover process and they do not deal well with slow connection setups of some wireless technologies. In this paper we propose an enhancement of Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6) with Simultaneous bindings. The result, called SPMIPv6, is a proactive network- controlled handover solution that allows some handover processes to be carried proactively while the mobile node is connected to the serving network. We analyze SPMIPv6 performance and show that the handover latency can be limited to one RTT between the mobile node and the target access router, which is typically below 10ms, and that the packet loss due to handover can be decreased and eliminated by appropriately buffering packets at the target access router. Moreover, our performance evaluation based on a SPMIPv6 implementation shows no TCP and UDP performance degradation during handovers. Two important characteristics of SPMIPv6 are its robustness to incorrect handover predictions and its built-in features to accommodate large network attachment latencies.

The network resources available on a mobile device may be better employed when taking into account the history of mobility patterns of the user. We propose an experience-based mechanism for network resource usage by applications on mobile hosts. It incorporates a machine learning component that adapts the network resource usage given a high-level metric, typically consisting of system as well as application related sub-metrics.

Uluru is a software platform that provides a number of enabling services to mobile multimedia applications including content personalisation and charging. The paper describes the design of such an enabling platform and explores its applicability from a business perspective. We describe the platform's functionalities and overall architecture, and discuss Callsong, an application that makes extensive use of Uluru's personalization and charging services.

We introduce a scalable application-level QoS adaptation service for roaming between wireless networks that are based on different technologies ('inter-tech' roaming). The service is part of a platform that supports the distribution of multimedia streams (e.g., a streamed TV channel) to mobile clients operating in a heterogeneous environment. Central to our approach is the notion of a service class, which is a domain-specific perceptual QoS level. Each domain in a wireless infrastructure must support a limited number of these service classes. Our adaptation service handles inter-tech roaming by handing a client off from one service class to another. We focus on the design of the adaptation service's client-side components. They combine the loss characteristics of the client's network interfaces with configurable policies to decide when to initiate a handoff to a target service class and when to complete it. We conclude with some experimental results.