Patent 8180385 was granted and assigned to AT&T Intellectual Property I on May, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
System(s) and method(s) that, periodically or when dynamically triggered, adapt data rates associated with user equipment (UE) in a network are presented. When the UE uses an application or a service, data traffic associated with the UE is inspected to obtain information relating to the application or service, which is used to determine an application/service margin. Current and historical information relating to communication conditions associated with the UE and an associated user is obtained to facilitate determining expected values of Quality-of-Service factors and communication condition metrics associated with the UE and thereby a volatility margin. For each adaptation time interval, the data rate can be adapted by determining a preliminary data rate and adjusting the preliminary data rate using the application/service margin and volatility margin to obtain the adapted data rate to be used for data communications between a node and the UE in the network.