Optimized Adaptive Jitter Buffer Design for Wireless Internet Telephony

The advent of mobile wireless Internet technology coupled with media streaming has raised the expectation of having quality consumer experience in using voice over IP (VoIP) over wireless LAN (WiFi) environment. In order to provide VoIP call quality comparable to regular telephony, one must correlate the performance impact of various parameters on VoIP over WiFi networks. Past work of Linden, J. (2004) has stressed the importance of adaptive jitter buffering (AJB) and latency management in wireless VoIP endpoints. Recent studies have focused on studying individual impact of components, namely, code- aware aspects, audio-quality awareness and wireless-specific optimizations, on jitter buffer technology. This paper studies the combined impact of the various components affecting adaptive jitter buffer (AJB) design. Our proposed AJB algorithm is codec-aware, E-model audio-quality aware, and co-exists with wireless optimizations such as frame packing and repeating. Moreover, our AJB design is based on actual network delay characteristics, obtained via a signaling protocol, as opposed to on packet inter-arrival times, thereby making our work novel in this domain.