QoS negotiations and real-time renegotiations for multimedia communications

The performance of multimedia applications on the Internet relates to network bandwidth availability, packet loss, and delay factors, as well as the human perceptions. Quality also links to the network delivery cost that a user is willing to pay. The paper presents a protocol, service bidding protocol, that allows multimedia applications to negotiate and re-negotiate on resource reservation with the networks. It enables a flexibility that applications can adapt to different network resources on-the-fly. This protocol works with the differentiated service (DiffServ) model, but can be extended easily to other service models. An implementation is constructed to evaluate the design performance.