Towards managed real-time communications in the internet environment

Our work is concerned with the provision of resource-managed multimedia communications in an. Internet environment. In this paper we outline an architecture and an implementation of a real-time continuous media adaptive application that includes the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and its associated control protocol (RTCP). The application makes use of the RTCP feedback reports for Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring of the traffic load on the network. The feedback reports are utilised by the application's adaptive rate controller to alleviate the problem of network congestion. We are assessing the suitability of RTPfRTCP in this application. Results obtained from our experiments with the adaptive rate controller are described and discussed. Then, some problems and issues concerning adaptive applications are presented. Finally, we outline the next phase of our work which concerns development of management facilities.