Multimedia Applications Should Be Adaptive

: The recent evolutions of network technology (more reliable, more heterogeneous) and the widespread development of multimedia applications (with real-time constraints and multipoint delivery requirements) make it important to give more control to the application and to the user when transmitting data over a network. The adaptation of applications to network conditions is introduced here as a technique to make data transmission more efficient, and to improve resource management in the network. We argue that application should adapt, show how they can adapt, and discuss the impact of this on the architecture of communication systems. Keywords: Efficient Communication Architectures, High Performance Networks, Integrated Implementation, Formal Specifications, Multimedia Applications. 1.0 Introduction Multimedia applications require timely transmission of their data. This translates into the requirement that networks provide a sufficient "Quality of Service" (or QoS). Introducing QoS gua...