A study of IP network impairments impact on media gateway performance

The focus of this study is to evaluate media gateway performance affected by impairments of an IP network in a practical environment. The performance merit is the end-to-end speech latency and voice quality. Various IP network impairments, such as packet loss, burst packet drop, network delay, and jitter are introduced into an end-to-end VoIP system to stress the gateways during the tests. The end-to-end VoIP testbed architecture, the experiment methodology, testing tools, and testing results are presented to provide first-hand insights into many practical issues, especially the gateway performance. Finally, the paper points out crucial factors that affect the quality of VoIP networks. Some possible remedies are suggested.