Design of a coherent mobile multimedia framework for convergent services

The high popularity of mobile computing and the increasing number of powerful mobile phones that are able to access high speed data networks pave the way to new scenarios for multimedia applications for mobile devices. Older limitations on network access, displaying capabilities and computing power have been surmounted. The users now have powerful devices and more bandwidth and expect that new, as well as traditional, multimedia applications are available on them. There is a need to offer users a coherent experience and provide multimedia independent of the constrains of the device in which it runs, and the network access technologies used. A way to achieve this is to use a software framework on top of which applications can be built. This framework is able to run on top of a wide variety of mobile platforms and enables a fast and easy deployment of multimedia clients. This paper analyzes the requirements and describes the architecture of Multimedia Open Internet Services and Telecommunication Environment (MONSTER), a framework for mobile multimedia clients currently developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS).