TDMoIP - Packet Loss

Packet Loss

While proper application of traffic engineering and quality-of-service (QoS) is expected to minimize packet loss, packets will at times arrive at the egress out of order. They may also have been dropped altogether within the PSN. The TDMoIP control word described above includes a 16-bit sequence number for detecting and handling lost and mis-ordered packets. In the case of lost packets, TDMoIP requires insertion of interpolation packets to maintain TDM timing. Misordered packets may be either reordered or dropped and interpolated.

While the insertion of arbitrary packets may be sufficient to maintain the TDM timing, in voice applications packet loss can cause gaps or errors that result in choppy, annoying, or even unintelligible speech. The precise effect of packet loss on voice quality and the development of packet loss concealment algorithms have been the subject of detailed study in the VoIP community, but their results are not directly applicable to the TDMoIP case. This is because VoIP packets typically contain between 80 samples (10 ms) and 240 samples (30 ms) of the speech signal, while TDMoIP packets may contain only a small number of samples. Since TDMoIP packets are so small, it is acceptable to simply insert a constant value in place of any lost speech samples. Assuming that the input signal is zero-mean (i.e. contains no DC component), minimal distortion is attained when this constant is set to zero. Alternatively, more sophisticated approaches call for optimally predicting the values of missing samples.