Kendra: adaptive Internet system
Abstract This paper describes an audio delivery system model called Kendra. We focus on Kendra’s adaptive delivery processes and the experimentation carried out to analyse it. The system trades off quality of sound against periods of silence; therefore, adaptation changes the format of the audio data to save bandwidth when bandwidth becomes more scarce. Typically adaptive systems are composed of a monitoring component and a switching component. The Kendra monitoring component has predictive capabilities, which advise the switching component to adapt either to a better quality or to a more bandwidth friendly format when it detects lower bandwidth. The prediction element can vary the amount of data it uses in its prediction, trading-off accuracy with the system’s impedance on the performance. Such systems exhibit many other tradeoffs that determine how sensitive and/or optimistic the system is to its environment, and this is explored in our experimentation. We conclude our work by discussing these network conditions and tradeoffs and how they affect the performance of the system.