Comparison of Adaptive Internet Multimedia Applications (Special Issue on Distributed Processing for Controlling Telecommunications Systems)

The current Internet does not offer any quality of service guarantees or support to Internet multimedia applications such as Internet telephony and video-conferencing, due to the best-effort nature of the Internet. Their performance may be adversely affected by network congestion. Also, since these applications commonly employ the UDP transport protocol, which lacks congestion control mechanisms, they may severely over-load the network and starve other applications. We present an overview of recent research efforts in developing adaptive delivery models for Internet multimedia applications, which dynamically adjust the transmission rate according to network conditions. We classify the approaches used to develop adaptive delivery models with brief descriptions of representative research work. We then evaluate the approaches based on important design issues and performance criteria, such as the salability of the control mechanism, responsiveness in detecting and reacting to congestion, and ability to accommodate receiver heterogeneity. Some conclusions are developed regarding the suitability of particular design choices under various conditions.