Performance evaluation study for QoS-aware triple play services over entry-level xDSL connections

Abstract

Nowadays IT and telecom worlds and specifically all network, service, and content providers show special interest in multiservice delivery. The concurrent provision of video or TV content, voice, and fast Internet via the same network and user equipment, known as “triple play service”, constitutes one of the major concerns in modern telecommunications due to the latest developments in the areas of video and audio encoding which strain the capacity of content delivery systems. The combination of the above technologies has raised significant quality of service related issues. Problems such as full exploitation of available bandwidth, providing adequate quality of service to subscribers and meeting the requirements of all three supported services (video, voice, and data), must be addressed. Based on this framework, the paper examines the performance of the most common packet scheduling techniques (PQ, WFQ, WFQ-LL) used in IP triple play architecture, considering also two different packetization schemes applied to single-layer video. The performance of these scheduling algorithms is assessed, in order to propose the most appropriate solution, supporting the triple play bundle. The evaluation of schedulers is based on simulations designed taking into account existing triple play networks, while trace files are used for the simulation of video flows.