Delay jitter control for real-time communication in a packet switching network

Abstract

A real-time channel is a simplex connection between two nodes characterized by parameters representing the performance requirements of the client. These parameters may include a bound on the minimum connection bandwidth, a bound on the max- imum packet delay, and a bound on the maximum packet loss rate. Such a connection may be esta- blished in a packet-switching environment by means of the schemes described by some of the authors in previous papers. In this paper, we study the feasibil- ity of bounding the delay jitter for real-time channels in a packet-switched store-and-forward wide-area net- work with general topology, extending the scheme proposed in the previous papers. We prove the correctness of our solution, and study its effectiveness by means of simulations. The results show that the scheme is capable of providing a significantreduction in delay jitter, that there is no accumulation of jitter along the path of a channel, and that jitter control reduces the buffer space required in the network significantly.