End-to-end quality of service and flow control for adaptive channels

Providing quality of service (QoS) for applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and enforcing service level agreements (SLA) are major requirement in any current and future communication networks. On the other hand, more communication networks are employing adaptive transmission mechanisms, such as DVB-S2 ACM in satellite communication networks. In non-adaptive networks, QoS enforcers use static bit rate configurations. However, using a static bit rate configuration in an adaptive network may result in underflow situations, during which it may not be possible to utilize the full capacity of the transmission channel and expensive resources may therefore be wasted, In addition, using a static bit rate configuration in an adaptive network may result in overflow situations, during which it may be necessary to drop user traffic packets and therefore quality of service may not be maintained. It is therefore imperative that QoS enforcers have knowledge of the network's available bit rate at all times. This invention describes a method for achieving exactly that.