Evaluating the effects of buffer management on voice transmission over packet switching networks

Transmission of G.729A coded speech over packet switching networks including forward error correction is considered. Three buffer management policies are applied: simple, random and privileged. The privileged policy plays an important role to achieve quasi-uniform packet loss among multiple users. Its effect on spreading the loss among various sources and in avoiding consecutive or closely timed losses for any source is described. In this paper, the subjective quality improvement by correctly adapting the loss pattern to the sensitivity of the G.729A algorithm is described.