An adaptive transport service for multimedia streams

The study and the implementation of an adaptive service for multimedia streams based on partial order and partial reliability connections (POC) is presented in this paper. A POC connection provides a service authorized to support both bounded losses and bounded disorder. Such parameters can be used to accurately define the range of conditions over which an adaptive application can perform acceptably. The POC concept is motivated by the fact that heterogeneous switched packet networks are plagued by unordered delivery and packet losses which tax performance of both current protocols and application. The performance of the POC adaptive service is analyzed through one representative multimedia application: a MPEG video server.