Enhancing adaptive control in VoIP by characterizing congestive packet loss

It is well known that packet loss is an indication of network congestion. Thus, numerous applications including adaptive control in VoIP detects packet loss and responds to reduce the congestion. However, detecting packet loss provides very limited information about the state of the network. In this paper, we attempt to use observations of the delay and loss correlation to characterize congestive packet loss. Specifically, we propose a scheme called limited-bottleneck aware control that attempts to distinguish between packet loss due to a limited bandwidth bottleneck and packet loss that is more random-like due to a high level of statistical multiplexing. Such a distinction would allow the adaptive control to be more intelligent to respond to congestive packet loss in order to optimize the performance.