Connection-Oriented Service Renegotiation for Scalable Video Delivery

A common approach for supporting continuous media traffic is via resource reservation at connection establishment time. The shortcomings of this approach are the lack of flexibility in renegotiating performance parameters after connection establishment and the inability to react to changing network load conditions. A more desirable goal is the ability to scale the performance of individual connections during a connection’s lifespan within the context of a network’s capacity. In this paper we propose a protocol for renegotiating continuous media connections in a wide-area environment, considering an overall network perspective on resource availability rather than a per-connection resource management scheme. We also show the scaling gains that can be achieved by adapting the parameters of an encoding algorithm in the user workstations to justify the use of the protocol.