Jitter analysis of CBR streams in multimedia networks

The performance of real-time applications such as video and voice streams relies on packet delay jitter. Large delay jitter causes buffer overflow or underflow at the receiver end and the user encounters interrupt. The delay jitter is mainly due to the perturbation of background traffic in the bottleneck router. Fulton and Li (1998) provide an analytical approximation for the first-order and second-order statistics of delay jitter. However, their analysis is based on a Markovian model of the background traffic, which is not quite suitable for Internet traffic and requires lots of computational effort. We propose an efficient method to predict the jitter variance of a CBR (constant-bit-rate) connection based on the wavelet model of the background traffic. The wavelet analysis extracts the statistical properties of background traffic and the analysis result can be used to predict an upper bound for the jitter variance of the CBR connection.