Mobile Multimedia: Reflecting on Dynamic Service Provision

Delivering multimedia services to roaming subscribers raises significant challenges for content providers. There are a number of reasons for this; however, the principal difficulties arise from the inherent differences between the nature of mobile computing usage, and that of its static counterpart. The harnessing of appropriate contextual elements pertaining to a mobile subscriber at any given time offers significant opportunities for enhancing and customising service delivery. Dynamic content provision is a case in point. The versatile nature of the mobile subscriber offers opportunities for the delivery of content that is most appropriate to the subscriber’s prevailing context, and hence is most likely to be welcomed. To succeed in this endeavour requires an innate understanding of the technologies, the mobile usage paradigm and the application domain in question, such that conflicting demands may be reconciled to the subscriber’s benefit. In this paper, multimedia-augmented service provision for mobile subscribers is considered in light of the availability of contextual information. In particular, context-aware pre-caching is advocated as a means of maximising the possibilities for delivering context-aware services to mobile subscribers in scenarios of dynamic contexts.