Design and applications of a delay jitter control scheme for packet-switching internetworks

Abstract

Delay jitter is the variation of the delays with which packets traveling on a network connection reach their destination. For good quality of reception, continuous-media (video, audio, image) streams require that jitter be kept below a sufficiently small upper bound. This paper proposes a distributed mechanism for controlling delay jitter in a packet-switching network. The mechanism can be applied to an internetwork that satisfies the conditions detailed in the paper, and can coexist with other schemes (including the absence of any scheme) for jitter control within the same network, the same node, and even the same real-time channel. The mechanism makes the distribution of buffer space requirements more uniform over a channel’s route, and reduces by a non-negligible amount the total buffer space needed by a channel. The paper argues that, if these advantages are sufficient to justify the higher costs of the distributed jitter control mechanism with respect to a non-distributed one, it would be useful to offer to the network’s users a jitter control service based on the mechanism proposed here.