Delay performance measurements in multimedia switching

A multimedia service connection is usually composed of several components, e.g., video, voice, data and control. Characteristics of these tributaries may vary substantially and thus it has been difficult to develop comprehensive analytical models to estimate, e.g., delay or bit error ratio performance. Additionally, queuing at various network nodes changes characteristics of the bit streams leading to increase of traffic burstiness. Due to the bursty nature of multimedia traffic, buffering easily becomes a critical issue consequently affecting delay performance. Since no adequate models for delay estimation are available, this paper approaches the performance problem by carrying out measurements in studying delay performance in multimedia switching nodes. MMPP (Markow-Modulated Poisson Process) distribution was chosen to represent performance and bursty nature of multimedia traffic