Scheduling variable rate multimedia streams over a shared Internet with QoS guarantees

This paper looks at the problem of delivering QoS controlled video streams from a single point (known as the headend or the distribution server) to to a collective of recipient nodes over a shared Internet backbone. Due to fact that the available bandwidth on the Internet backbone is highly variable and the bandwidth demands of the individual streams are also variable, standard scheduling algorithms are difficult to use. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by coupling between the application generating the traffic and lower lying transport layers, which actually control the transmission of data.