The Performance of Multiplexing Voice and Circuit Switched Data in UMTS over IP-Networks

For the transmission of voice traffic in IP-networks the commonly used protocol suite for realtime data transfer in IP-networks leads to a very large protocol overhead for voice data and a poor utilization of the bandwidth for user data. Multiplexing several flows on a route into one IP packet overcomes this problem. In the future UMTS, realtime traffic like voice and circuit switched data are transported over the same network in the wireline part of the UMTS terrestrial access network. The following investigation shows the performance tradeoffs of multiplexing in two different types of quality of service enhanced IP-networks. The analytical results take into account both voice and circuit switched data. Various multiplexing and tunneling schemes are compared. Keywords: IP, RTP, Multiplexing, UMTS, CAC, QoS, VoIP, AAL-2