Patent ID: 8650301

Claim:
A method for adaptively increasing bit-rate consumed by a consumer node in a real-time peer-to-peer (P2P) network delivering real-time multimedia content, comprising: determining desirability to switch to a higher bit-rate consumption respective of a current bit-rate consumption provided by a first resource node; sending requests to resource nodes of the P2P network for supply of additional bandwidth to support only a difference in bandwidth between the higher bit-rate consumption and a current bit-rate consumption; connecting to at least one resource node of the P2P network that can supply the requested additional bandwidth, thereby increasing bit-rate consumption through connections to the at least one resource node providing the requested additional bandwidth and the first resource node, wherein the at least one resource node and the first resource node deliver a same content of the real-time multimedia at different bit rates; determining whether there are connection problems due to the increase in bit-rate consumption; and consuming, by the consumer node, from the at least one resource node the current bit-rate in addition to the requested additional bandwidth when no connection problems occur and it is established that the consumer node is capable of handling the higher bit-rate consumption of the real-time multimedia content.