Hierarchical Session Control Architecture for Provisioning N-Screen Services in Mobile Operator Network

Abstract

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) defined the Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) to support point-to-multipoint services in mobile networks. Even with the MBMS, control signaling and streaming to devices with different capabilities have to traverse the core and backhaul networks. In this paper, we propose hierarchical session control architecture and a mechanism for request routing to efficiently support N-Screen services in mobile operator networks. N-Screen services are used to manage users’ active sessions among multiple devices having different functionalities, network access, and locations. To support N-Screen services within the mobile networks, we introduce new nodes that perform service announcements, group session management, and localized content adaptation and sharing. The hierarchical and localized session management and sharing reduce the traffic of backhaul and core networks and improve the scalability of the legacy centralized mobile network architecture. The system supports the mobility of both the sources and devices with no effect on the overall multicast connections and also decreases the service disruptions. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is demonstrated through simulation results in terms of network latency and overall throughput.