1st International ICST Conference on Multimedia Services Access Networks

Research Article

Playout buffering in IP telephony: a quality maximization approach

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/MSAN.2005.1489941,
        author={Luigi  Atzori and Mirko L.  Lobina and  M.  Isola},
        title={Playout buffering in IP telephony: a quality maximization approach},
        proceedings={1st International ICST Conference on Multimedia Services Access Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MSAN},
        year={2005},
        month={8},
        keywords={Playout buffering speech quality evaluation IP Telephony ITU-T E-Model.},
        doi={10.1109/MSAN.2005.1489941}
    }
    
  • Luigi Atzori
    Mirko L. Lobina
    M. Isola
    Year: 2005
    Playout buffering in IP telephony: a quality maximization approach
    MSAN
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/MSAN.2005.1489941
Luigi Atzori1,2,*, Mirko L. Lobina1,2,*, M. Isola1,2
  • 1: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari
  • 2: Cagliari, Italy
*Contact email: l.atzori@diee.unica.it , m.lobina@diee.unica.it

Abstract

In IP Telephony, playout buffering is operated at the receiver side to compensate network delay variations. This function allows the receiver to reduce packet lateness at the expense of an increase in the end-to-end delay. In the last years, a new approach has been proposed for playout buffering. It is based on using a voice quality model capable of predicting the end-user perceived quality from the network and system parameters. The playout delay (end-to-end delay) is set so as to maximize the quality according to the adopted model. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm based on this approach. The major contribution is the ability to deal with the burstiness in packet losses. This is a significant advance for two main reasons: bursty losses often affect IP Telephony applications; the temporal loss correlation influences the human perception of the quality degradation. Accordingly, we propose a new optimality criterion to control the playout delay, which is based on the extensions proposed by the ETSI Tiphon for the ITU-T E-Model. Experimental results on real traces prove the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.