Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 1, number 1, 2008 // View article

Adaptive Congestion Detection and Control at the Application Level for VoIP

Authors:
Teck-Kuen Chua
David C. Pheanis

Keywords: VoIP, QoS, congestion detection, congestion avoidance, adaptive transmission control, real-time media.

Abstract:
For decades, researchers have worked extensively in the area of congestion control for packet-switched networks. Many proposed solutions take advantage of the congestion-control mechanism in Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and these approaches work well for networks that have heavy TCP traffic. However, these approaches are not universally effective — they fail completely for protocols that do not implement congestioncontrol mechanisms. In particular, these approaches do not work with the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Realtime media-streaming technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video conferencing use UDP and therefore do not respond well to existing congestionavoidance techniques. We propose a new, adaptive, responsive, end-to-end technique to implement application-level congestion detection and control for real-time applications such as VoIP. Unlike existing methods, which rely on packet loss as a signal to reduce the transmission rate, our solution proactively reacts to network congestion to prevent packet loss, thus improving the QoS of applications that employ our algorithm.

Pages: 40 to 51

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2008. Used with permission.

Publication date: February 24, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644