Heavy tail jitter in mobile packet networks

Jitter is a major impairment degrading quality of service in real time applications. This paper presents a general packet jitter assessment methodology in a multi node path in the presence of heavy tailed traffic. A network processing factor |T|/sub /spl lambda// dependent on the traffic characteristics, the nodes processing time and the number of nodes in a route, is presented. It is shown that jitter performance is determined by |T|/sub /spl lambda// and this allows the establishment of design constraints and the definition of the feasibility space for a routing algorithm in order to guarantee a quality of service (QoS). Impact of a wireless link in the overall path performance is also studied.