Method and system for resource-aware dynamic bandwidth control

Abstract

Resource-aware dynamic bandwidth control uses information about current network state and receiver performance to avoid, minimize and/or recover from the effects of network spikes and data processing spikes. Linear models may be used to estimate a time required to process data packets in a data processing queue, and are thus useful to determine whether a data processing spike is occurring. When a data processing spike occurs, an alarm may be sent from a client to a server notifying the server that the client must drop packets. In response, the server can encode and transmit an independent packet suitable for replacing the queued data packets which can then be dropped by the client and the independent packet present to the processor instead.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . A server comprising:
 a data encoder and a network engine, the data encoder and network engine operable to receive a data stream, and encode the data stream into I-packets or N-packets for transmission to a client according to an output bandwidth, wherein the data stream is encoded in N-packets during normal operation, and the data stream is encoded in I-packets only during an alarm state; and   wherein the network engine is operable to monitor network state information, and is responsive to the network state information and data processing state information received from the client, to adjust the output bandwidth.   
     
     
         2 . The server as recited in  claim 1 , wherein the network engine is further responsive to a data processing spike alarm received from said client to encode the data stream in I-packets replacing a portion of previously transmitted N-packets. 
     
     
         3 . The server as recited in  claim 1 , wherein the data stream is encoded according to a low-latency transport protocol. 
     
     
         4 . The server as recited in  claim 3 , wherein the data stream includes graphical output, and the encoder is operable to encode graphical commands and video data converted out of the data stream.