Payoff adaptation of communication for distributed interactive applications

Present distributed applications are not typically designed to adapt to changes in network conditions. In addition, network‐based adaptation does not typically consider the requirements of specific applications and, therefore, may take actions contradictory to application’s needs. This paper presents a cooperative solution in which a configurable communication layer is used to adapt communication in response to both application requirements and network resource availability. Adaptation decisions are based on (1) payoff functions which capture the application requirements in a functional form, and (2) service availability curves which represent network resource availability. Experimentation with multimedia applications and a variable reliability protocol demonstrates the benefit of using payoff‐based adaptation.