Rate flow control for packetised voice on Ethernet local area network

Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) is widely used in the industry and academic environment for data communications. It has good throughput but poor delay characteristics, rendering it unsuitable for voice communications. However, the potential cost benefit of integrating data and voice users in a single LAN provides a strong motivation for packetised voice transmission. This paper proposes a rate control scheme to improve the performance of voice users on an Ethernet LAN. The rate control scheme adaptively adjusts the source coding rate based on the network load. Simulation models are used to characterise the performance of the rate control schemes. Subjective listening test is subsequently carried out to assess the speech quality of various rate control schemes.