Adaptive quality of service for streamed MPEG-4 over the Internet

Currently multimedia is either downloaded before viewing, or streamed over a network. However, streaming real-time or near real-time applications with a specified Quality of Service (QoS) over the Internet is not yet a solved problem. The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) can be used to facilitate streaming, but also has the potential to support QoS. By gathering network statistics during the session and defining different QoS levels, we propose to adapt multimedia streaming to a fluctuating network load and/or client requests, thereby providing adaptive QoS. We describe the simple server and client applications we have implemented to illustrate this adaptation process.