A New Performance Measurement for Voice Transmission in Burst and Packet Switching

Voice transmission in burst switching is characterized by the process of talkspurt clipping, while in packet switching, it is characterized by the process of packet delay. In most analyses, the talkspurt clipping has been measured by the clipping probability averaged over all bits, and the packet delay has been measured by the delay performance averaged over all packets. The resulting measures overlook the duration of clipping in a talkspurt and the significant difference of delay in packets arriving at different times. Because of the nature of voice, different effects of these may result in substantially different degrees of voice distortion. This paper studies the worst case performance of both processes. The voice traffic is modeled as a process alternating between overload and underload periods. Statistically, more clipping and delay will be incurred while in the overload period. By worst case we mean that, in burst switching, we measure the worst case of talkspurt clipping duration in an overload period, while in packet switching, we measure the worst case of packet delay in an overload period. Furthermore, a simple closed form equation is derived which gives a very good approximation of the worst case mean packet delay performance. This equation can be more generally applied when the packet service time is to be geometrically distributed or when voice and data are to be integrated. The voice performances in burst switching and packet switching are also compared.