Experiences from an adaptive communications library

Existing packet-switched networks usually do not guarantee any quality-of-service. The bandwidth available to a certain application changes as a function of network load. Real-time multimedia applications must be able to adapt to the available bandwidth to provide higher user-perceived quality. This article describes an adaptivity library, which measures the available end-to-end bandwidth and schedules the packet transmission. The results in a real network environment indicate that it is possible to adapt to varying network conditions