Multimedia streaming gateway with jitter detection

This paper investigates a novel active buffer management scheme, "Jitter Detection" (JD) for gateway-based congestion control to stream multimedia traffics in packet-switched networks. The quality of multimedia presentation can be greatly degraded due to network delay variation or jitter when transported over a packet-switched network. Jitter degrades the timing relationship among packets in a single media stream and between packets from different media streams and, hence, creates multimedia synchronization problems. Moreover, too much jitter will also degrade the performance of the streaming buffer in the client. Packets received by the client will be rendered useless if they have accumulated enough jitter. The proposed active buffer management scheme will improve the quality of service in multimedia networking by detecting and discarding packets that accumulated enough jitter, such as to maintain a high bandwidth for packets within the multimedia stream's jitter tolerance. Simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme can effectively lower the average received packet jitter and increase the goodput of the received packets when compared to random early detection (RED) and DropTail used in gateway-based congestion control. Furthermore, simulation results have also revealed that the proposed scheme can maintain the same TCP friendliness when compared to that of RED and DropTail used for multimedia streams.