A dynamic rate control mechanism for source coded traffic in a fast packet network

To achieve better statistical gain for voice and video traffic and to relieve congestion in fast packet networks, a dynamic rate control mechanism is proposed. An analytical model is developed to evaluate the performance of this control mechanism for voice traffic. The feedback delay for the source node to obtain the network congestion information is represented in the model. The study indicates that significant improvement in statistical gain can be realized for smaller capacity links (e.g., links that can accommodate less than 24 voice calls) with a reasonable feedback time (about 100 ms). The tradeoff for increasing the statistical gain is temporary degradation of voice quality to a lower rate. It is shown that whether the feedback delay is exponentially distributed or constant does not significantly affect performance in terms of fractional packet loss and average received coding rate. It is also shown that using the number of calls in talkspurt or the packet queue length as measures of congestion provides comparable performance