Towards a lightweight middleware for mobile multimedia communication awareness

The quality of service requirements for multimedia applications are well-known and have been widely discussed in the literature over the years. Though, the deployment of new radio access technologies and multimedia services over the new heterogeneous networks have given rise to new and challenging issues and, in this new context, improved performance of such applications is essential for the success of the next generation of mobile networks. These new issues are being tackled from several points of view. In this paper we present a new approach for mobile device centres, based on providing the application level with a seamless communication adaptation to network issues. Due to the changeable nature of wireless network we have focussed on using information from lower levels to make the application level more adaptable. In other words, we propose to deploy a lightweight middleware based on cross-layer protocols for accessing lower layers parameters in order to provide adaptive techniques to the application level.