Optimal adaptive bandwidth monitoring for QoS based retrieval

Network aware multimedia delivery applications guarantee QoS parameters like media object transmission time limit by actively monitoring the available bandwidth of the network and adapting the object to a target size that can be transmitted within a given time limit. A critical problem is how to obtain an accurate enough estimation of available bandwidth while not wasting too much time in bandwidth testing. We present an algorithm to determine the optimal amount of bandwidth testing, given a probabilistic confidence level for network-aware multimedia retrieval. Our implementation and experiments show that the algorithm finds out the optimal amount of bandwidth testing effectively with minimum computation overhead.