Analysis of the delay and jitter of voice traffic over the Internet

Abstract

In the future, voice communication is expected to migrate from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to the Internet. Because of the particular characteristics (low volume and burstiness) and stringent delay and loss requirements of voice traffic, it is important to separate voice traffic from other traffic in the network by providing it with a separate queue. In this study, we conduct a thorough assessment of voice delay in this context. We conclude that priority queuing is the most appropriate scheduling scheme for the handling of voice traffic, while preemption of non-voice packets is strongly recommended for sub-10 Mbit/s links. We also find that per-connection custom packetization is in most cases futile, i.e. one packet size allows a good compromise between an adequate end-to-end delay and an efficient bandwidth utilization for voice traffic.