Jitter compensation on the downlink of future mobile multimedia communications systems

Not only is the amount of packet traffic carried on mobile communications networks growing, it is also anticipated that such communication networks will eventually use packet-based backbone and core networks. Considering this, characteristics of packet (IP) traffic such as delay jitter will be of growing significance to the performance of these mobile communications systems. Not only will such characteristics affect the quality of service these systems can provide, they will also affect the performance of the multiple access aspect of the mobile network, influencing system capacity, utilization, and delay profiles. We highlight why delay jitter is important to a mobile communications system operating with a packet based backbone and core network, and present a jitter compensation technique that is designed to improve system performance in response to delay jitter, whilst respecting the quality of service requirements of the traffic to be carried. We review the prior work in jitter compensation for fixed networks, and investigate which techniques are appropriate for compensating delay jitter at the multiple access component of a mobile network. We present one such jitter compensation technique, and detail a simulation model and associated results used to study the performance of this technique.