Comparing the efficiency of IP and ATM telephony

Circuit switching, suited to providing real-time services due to the low and fixed switching delay, is not cost effective for building integrated services networks bursty data traffic because it is based on static allocation of resources which is not efficient with bursty data traffic. Moreover, since current circuit switching technologies handle flows at rates which are integer multiples of 64 kb/s, low bit rate voice encoding cannot be taken advantage of without aggregating multiple phone calls on a single channel. This work explores the real-time efficiency of IP telephony, i.e. the volume of voice traffic with deterministically guaranteed quality related to the amount of network resources used. IP and ATM are taken into consideration as packet switching technology for carrying compressed voice and it is compared to circuit switching carrying PCM (64 Kb/s) encoded voice. ADPCM32 is the voice encoding scheme used throughout most of the paper. The impact of several network parameters, among which the number of hops traversed by a call, on the real-time efficiency is studied.