A binary SOAP-based messaging infrastructure for mobile multimedia sessions

Multimedia streaming to mobile devices is gaining popularity. In order to provide a high Quality-of-Experience to users of such devices, adaptation and caching mechanisms need to be provided at various places in the network. Such mechanisms can only perform well when they have sufficient metadata on the media, network, user and device at their disposal. In this paper, we identify the requirements that are posed on metadata exchange mechanisms in a mobile context. Since none of the available mechanisms meet the requirements on a satisfactory level, we propose a new binary XML-based messaging infrastructure that does perform as required. Our experiments show that this infrastructure offers the needed functionality, while consuming less bandwidth and power than current mechanisms.