Applying traditional VoIP playout delay control algorithms to MANETs

Abstract

Jitter, delay, and packet loss are the main factors impacting voice quality of interactive VoIP sessions on today's Internet. Such phenomena are often amplified when operating over mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), so providing VoIP services over this kind of networks represents a huge challenge. On one hand, the routing protocol used by a MANET plays a very important role on the performance of VoIP sessions. On the other hand, playout delay control algorithms play another crucial role on VoIP, and are helpful to smooth the effects of jitter and to improve the interactivity of VoIP sessions. Such playout delay control algorithms trade-off the time that voice packets spend in the receiver's buffer while keeping an acceptable packet loss rate. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of playout delay control algorithms for VoIP over MANETs by testing algorithms that are already widely accepted and stable on the Internet.