[Standards] Coping with low bandwidth channels in Jingle

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Paul Witty wrote:
> Dave Cridland wrote:
>> On Wed Feb 13 13:13:26 2008, Lauri Kaila wrote:
>>> If I understood you, a client should know its network capacity. Then
>>> it tells that infromation to the other end so they can agree on the
>>> best media fromat that doesn't exceed the limit. But isn't it almost
>>> impossible to know actual end-to-end bandwidth beforehand unless some
>>> kind of QoS is present?
>>
>> Sometimes the user knows the bandwidth of the immediate upstream link.
>> Often, though, they don't - people usually know the advertized maximum
>> downlink bandwidth, but usually don't know either the upstream, nor
>> the actual bandwidth of either direction.
>>
>> The actual device may know it's immediate link rate. Sometimes, at
>> least - often actual link rates are deeply buried inside weird APIs,
>> and finding overhead, latency, and other somewhat related link
>> characteristics isn't usually possible.
>>
>> But there is indeed no practical way to know the end to end bandwidth
>> short of measuring it, and that measurement is quite tricky. There's a
>> very interesting paper on the subject of intermediate link measurement
>> by van Jacobson, actually. People interested in this sort of thing can
>> probably find it with a Google for pathchar, or download pchar (an
>> open source implementation). You'll note it takes several minutes for
>> each hop, and uses quite a bit of traffic to do so.
> Fortunately, actually knowing the bandwidth is not necessary:
> 
> while (incoming_packet_loss)
> {
>    advertise_less_bandwidth();
>    wait_for_a_bit();
> }

Ah, in that case an informational message might be more appropriate
(just tell the other side that you're experiencing packet loss):

<iq from='juliet at capulet.com/balcony'
    id='active1'
    to='romeo at montague.net/orchard'
    type='set'>
  <jingle xmlns='urn:xmpp:tmp:jingle'>
          action='session-info'
          initiator='romeo at montague.net/orchard'
          sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'>
    <packet-loss xmlns='urn:xmpp:tmp:jingle:apps:audio-rtp:info'/>
  </jingle>
</iq>

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