End-to-End Quality Management Method for VoIP Speech Using RTCP XR

Abstract

Quality of service (QoS) control is one of the key technologies for the next-generation network (NGN). In the conventional method, the bearer quality on the carrier network is managed, but the end-to-end QoS for end users needs to be guaranteed. The quality of a public switched telephone network (PSTN) is guaranteed, and the quality of the telephone terminal is also stable. Therefore, end-to-end quality management of PSTN services has been achieved. However, the quality of neither IP networks nor VoIP services is guaranteed in general. In addition, there are numerous VoIP terminals and the differences in their implementations strongly affect the speech quality experienced by end users. Thus, quality management technologies need to be embedded in the VoIP terminal to achieve the equivalent of end-to-end QoS management for the PSTN. These technologies are recommended in IETF RFC3611 and ITU-T recommendation P.564 as the framework for end-to-end quality management, but their usage is not shown. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end quality management method for VoIP speech using RTCP XR. We realize an end-to-end QoS monitoring method between the customer and the operator of the carrier network. We define the parameters that should be implemented in RTCP XR packets to estimate the quality of VoIP services based on experimental results.