A Framework For Adaptive Applications

Introduction The evolution towards faster and more reliable networks is contributing to the development of distributed multimedia applications. These kinds of applications are mostly realtime and interactive and they impose very stringent requirements to the communication services network infrastructure and end-systems. Their timeliness introduces a broader concept of quality of service (QoS) than the one used for data communications so far. Moreover, the application must be aware that a user expecting to interact as naturally as possible with the remote end by combining different media will receive its output. QoS is an abstract concept that tries to describe how well a communication can be maintained between two or more users. The qualitative aspects appreciated by the end-user must be mapped into quantifiable parameters to enable the system to enforce them by guaranteeing some minimum values for a given set of those parameters. Distributed multimedia systems (DMSs) includ