Patent ID: 8171157

Claim:
A method of communicating comprising: controlling an audio parameter based in part on audio thresholds and an amount of available communication bandwidth to attain a maximum allocation for an audio modality as part of a first allocation phase to allocate the amount of communication available bandwidth to the audio modality as a priority, next to an application sharing modality, followed by a video modality, and then to a file transfer modality during the first allocation phase and a second allocation phase to allocate an amount of additional bandwidth up to a maximum audio threshold for the audio modality during the second allocation phase; controlling an application sharing parameter based in part on application sharing thresholds and the amount of available communication bandwidth remaining for the application sharing modality after controlling the audio parameter during the first allocation phase; controlling a video parameter based in part on a video threshold and the amount of available communication bandwidth for the video modality after controlling the application sharing parameter during the first allocation phase and using a third allocation phase to allocate an amount of additional communication bandwidth to the video modality up to a satisfactory video quality threshold; and controlling a file transfer parameter based in part on a file transfer threshold and the amount of available communication bandwidth for a file transfer modality after controlling the video parameter during the first allocation phase, the controlling further including using a first distribution ratio that comprises a video, application sharing, and file transfer distribution as part of a fourth allocation phase to distribute any additional amount of communication bandwidth after achieving a video quality threshold and a second distribution ratio as part of a fifth allocation phase after using the first distribution ratio to distribute any remaining bandwidth.