The same mobile multimedia services may be accessible through a variety of access networks ranging e.g. from General
Packet Radio Services (GPRS), typically providing access speeds of a few tens of kilobits per second, to 3G High-Speed
Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), whose bitrate is several megabits per second. Moreover, a receiver is likely to face
temporal variations of the available bitrate due to potential cell handovers and reallocation of the cell radio resources.
Consequently, bitrate adaptation is a desirable feature for the streams to be transmitted.