A Statistical Approach to Adaptive Playout Scheduling in Voice Over Internet Protocol Communication

Factors like network delay, latency and bandwidth significantly affect the quality of communication using Voice over Internet Protocol. The use of jitter buffer at the receiving end compensates the effect of varying network delay up to some extent. But the extra buffer delay given for each packet plays a major role in playing late packets and thereby improving voice quality. As the buffer delay increases packet loss rate decreases, which in general is a very good sign. However, an increase of buffer delay beyond a certain limit affects the interactive quality of voice communication. In this paper, we propose a statistical framework for adaptive playout scheduling of voice packets based on network statistics, packet loss rate and availability of packets in the buffer. Experimental results show that the proposed model allocates optimal buffer delay with the lowest packet loss rate when compared with other algorithms