Jitter recovery strategies for multimedia traffic in ATM networks

Cell Delay Variation (CDV) or jitter is one of the most important performance parameters in packet-switched networks, especially for real-time multimedia applications, where the source and the receiver are synchronized. In this paper, jitter is studied on two levels: within the same traffic stream and between different traffic streams of the same multimedia application. A previous preliminary study [1] is extended by studying the effect of traversing multiple ATM nodes on the jitter parameters. To improve the jitter/inter-flows jitter performance, a traffic recovery algorithm is applied. Throughout this work, two jitter recovery strategies are investigated: the one where the recovery is applied at the destination node only (''Destination Only'') and the one where the recovery is applied also at intermediate nodes (''Intermediate Also''). Simulation results give insight to the problem and show that the jitter can be fairly controlled applying the traffic recovery mechanism.