A Study of IP Network Impairments Impact on Media Gateway Performance

The focus of this study is to evaluate media gateway performance affected by impairments of an IP network in a practical environment. The performance merit is the end-to-end speech latency and voice quality. Various IP network impairments, such as packet loss, burst packet drop, network delay, and jitter are introduced into an end-to-end VoIP system to stress the gateways during the tests. The end-to-end VoIP test-bed architecture, the experiment methodology, testing tools, and testing results are presented to provide first-hand insights on many practical issues, especial the gateway performance. Finally, the paper points our crucial factors that affect the quality of VoIP networks. Some possible remedies are suggested.