An Adaptable Quality of Service for Multimedia on the Internet

There are two general approaches to providing for isochronous streams in the current Internet. The first approach is the resource reservation approach through protocols such as RSVP, or ATM technology. This provides bandwidth guarantees, however, it also requires significant upgrading of resources in the underlying network. The other common approach is adaptive rate control where the end-system has control of its rate according to feedback from the client population. This approach cannot guarantee timely delivery and raises some scaling questions, however a properly implemented scheme does improve quality and it requires no changes to the underlying IP network. Hence, there exists a dichotomy of requirements ; 1. To cater for reservation protocols or 'hooks' for future reservation components, and 2. To provide an architecture which provides an application controlled QoS scheme, which scales to the size of the current Internet in a best- effort architecture