On the Efficiency of Packet Telephony

This paper presents a study on the efficiency of packet switching in providing toll quality telephone services. Packet switching is appealing for the implementation of a commercial telephone network because it features lower cost and higher manageability than circuit switching, and enables integration of real-time and non real-time services. This work compares the real-time efficiency of packet switching and circuit switching, i.e., the volume of voice traffic being guaranteed deterministic quality related to the amount of network resources used. For this purpose, we developed a call level simulator which allows a general topology network to be studied. The simulator performs call admission control according to the availability of the resources required to provide a deterministic delay bound for each call. Statistical data on accepted and rejected calls are the simulation output. Results show that packet size - possibly constrained by the protocol in use - is a key factor in determining the real-time efficiency. The packet size which maximizes real-time efficiency is devised analytically.