C. Giannelli (Ed.): Mobilware, LNICST 0007, pp. 340–351, 2009. © Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009 Context Aware Multiparty Session Support for Adaptive Multicasting in Heterogeneous Mobile Networks Josephine Antoniou 1 , Christian Riede 2 , Filipe Cabral Pinto 3 , and Andreas Pitsillides 1 1 Comp. Science Dp., University of Cyprus, 75 Kallipoleos str., P.O.Box 20537, CY-1678 Nicosia, Cyprus {josephin,andreas.pitsillides}@ucy.ac.cy 2 Fraunhofer FOKUS, Next Generation Network Infrastructures, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31, 10589 Berlin, Germany christian.riede@fokus.fraunhofer.de 3 PT Inovação, SA, Rua Eng. José Ferreira Pinto Basto, 3810 - 106 Aveiro, Portugal Filipe-c-pinto@ptinovacao.pt Abstract. The paper addresses the issue of achieving context-aware, adaptive multiparty sessions in a heterogeneous system by illustrating how to add elements of adaptivity and context-awareness to the session management functionality of such systems. The effective usage of situation/context information can lead to context-aware content casting, especially context-aware, adaptive multicasting. Therefore, regarding the multicast service, the key functionality of the enhanced session management is to create network subgroups based on network information as well as general user and environment context information to the extent that these are considered necessary for forming network-efficient groups, and in turn communicating the characteristics of these subgroups in the form of content stream descriptions to the media delivery function for obtaining the appropriate content for each subgroup. Keywords: session management, context, multicasting, heterogeneous mobile network, adaptivity. 1 Introduction 1 Recent years, from about the early 2000s have been characterized by global broadband penetration, Fixed-Mobile-Convergence, Triple Play and content provisioning over All-IP networks, whether text, audio or video data. The Telco world is currently challenged by the competition with the Internet and their quick time-to- market service provisioning. YouTube, Apple iTunes and social networking platforms like Facebook have impressively proven the dynamics of this new market led by the typical wired Internet services. Indeed, the Internet domain challenges the Telco’s 1 This work is funded by the ICT-2007-216462 C-CAST project.