UMTS is designed to offer high bandwidth radio access with QoS assurances for multimedia communications. In particular, real-time video communications services are expected to become a successful experience under UMTS networks. In this context, a video transmission service can be designed over the basis that UMTS can provide either a constant bit rate data channel or a dynamic variable bit rate data channel adapted to load conditions. In this latter approach, which is more efficient for both the user and the service provider, multimedia sources have to be timely designed in order to adapt their output rate to the instantaneous allowed channel rate. The target of this paper is to define an analytical model of adaptive real-time video sources in a UMTS network where system resources are dynamically shared among active users. © 2007 IEEE.