A control framework for abstract multiparty transport

The increasing demand for group-based multimedia communications, personalization and seamless mobility imposes the development of novel approaches to overcome the heterogeneity and dynamics of future network environments. The study developed in this article addresses a context-aware multiparty content delivery framework, capable of providing autonomic control of personalized group-based services to users by a hierarchical strategy with the concept of Abstract Multiparty Trees (AMTs). A thorough study of the proposed concept is presented, aiming to assess the scalability and flexibility of our framework and associated procedures. An analytical study quantifies the amount of reconfigurations and resources saved in the network whenever context changes, showing how the control framework scales when the network size increases. The evaluation through simulation analyses the performance of the proposed solution, meeting the results of the analytical study and showing a good performance regarding the reconfiguration of the AMTs in terms of time and control overhead. Finally, a proof-of-concept demonstrator is also detailed, in order to prove the feasibility of the AMT concept and the good performance of its main control operations.