The introduction of wireless multimedia applications brought about an attractive characteristic from a resource management point of view, namely the adaptability of such applications. Allocations made to deliver the multimedia applications can be varied depending on the conditions of the user, the network, or both. In a framework for resource management, the role of a bandwidth adaptation algorithm (BAA) is to provision the adaptation of the different users in A cell. Previous proposals for BAA persistently engage the adaptation whenever required. Naturally, this comes at a high system cost.

In this work, the novel notion of stochastically triggered bandwidth adaptation algorithms (STBAA) is introduced. The objective of the STBAA framework is to allow system providers to exploit the tradeoff between admission ratios and user satisfaction in order to control the operational cost of adaptation1.